He should just get a barrel of Methanol and oxidizer and shoot that. That would be a nice present.

>> ^Boise_Lib:

>> ^juliovega914:
Alright, this is unbelievably fucking cool.
You guys might (not) remember the Meissner effect I posted earlier (http://videosift.com/video/The-Meissner-Effect-Awsome-physics) This is exactly the same effect.
The fundamental difference is that the superconductor in my vid is thicker than in this case. In this case, a 1 micron YBCO layer is deposited onto a sapphire wafer (probably through physical vapor deposition [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_a9Slv1T1UM, go to 3:15 if you want to skip to PVD])
When you deposit a thin film with PVD you will inevitably form small imperfections at the grain boundaries in the film, usually only nanometers wide. When brought down below the superconductive transition temperature (IE, liquid nitrogen temp), the magnetic field lines are able to penetrate these grain boundaries in discrete quantities (unlike the thicker superconductor) forming what they seem to be calling "quantum tubes". The superconductor pins the field lines into these quantum sized tubes, and the force required to distort the field lines is greater than the weight of the superconductor.
Read this for a bit more: http://www.quantumlevitation.com/levitation/The_physics.html, but it doesn't seem terribly well translated, and it cant seem to decide how layman's terms it wants to be.

I didn't think that PVD would form YBCO.
I could easily be wrong though--my knowledge is out of date.
Great video about the Meissner Effect.


Physical vapor deposition (evaporation) pretty much works with any material that can be evaporated in a vaccuum without decomposing. Metals, semi-metals, and many ceramics and metal-oxides are candidates.

>> ^jimnms:

Neodymium is a chemical element with the symbol Nd and atomic number 60. It is a soft silvery metal that tarnishes in air [Wikipedia].
The magnets are usually nickel coated to prevent oxidation and chipping. I have a quite a collection that I've ripped out of old hard drives.


Side note, wrap them in a little duct tape and they make suburb fridge magnets (sans tape they tend to scratch up your fridge and are sometimes a little hard to get your fingers under).

Neodymium is a chemical element with the symbol Nd and atomic number 60. It is a soft silvery metal that tarnishes in air [Wikipedia].

The magnets are usually nickel coated to prevent oxidation and chipping. I have a quite a collection that I've ripped out of old hard drives.

I am seriously irritated by people who laugh that much. It's okay to be mirthful, but jesus christ is the DS emitting nitrous oxide?

secret ingredient is ferric iron oxide powder, used to make black oil painting pigment, sold at art supply stores.

pretty nifty!

>> ^deathcow:

> Remember to oxidate your galvanized x432 scuba cylinder not
> before but after the hotplate tempering Inglebert process.
LOL you noob you just forgot to tune the spangles on a pallet of tanks pre Inglebertization.


True i'm not sure how i overlooked something so obvious.

> Remember to oxidate your galvanized x432 scuba cylinder not
> before but after the hotplate tempering Inglebert process.

LOL you noob you just forgot to tune the spangles on a pallet of tanks pre Inglebertization.

Don't you just hate it when videos like this gloss over the details.


Remember to oxidate your galvanized x432 scuba cylinder not before but after the hotplate tempering Inglebert process.

>> ^raverman:

Is the mercury reacting with the aluminium here?
or
is it just acting as a catalyst preventing aluminium oxide crystalizing, so it's actually oxygen reacting with aluminium creating oxide... but not crystallizing?


If I remember correctly the mercury combines with the aluminum to form an amalgam (which is why it seems to "soak" through the beam). The part of the amalgam exposed to air reacts to form aluminum oxide which flakes off, leaving most of the mercury behind to continue the process.

A small amount of mercury can destroy a large amount of aluminum.

Is the mercury reacting with the aluminium here?
or
is it just acting as a catalyst preventing aluminium oxide crystalizing, so it's actually oxygen reacting with aluminium creating oxide... but not crystallizing?

From what I know, those zircaloy fuel rods melt at around 1800-2200°C, not 1200°C as suggested in this clip. If I'm not mistaken, the hydrogen explosions might be a direct result of oxidation of those zircaloy rods, thus indicating a partial meltdown simply through the existence of vast amounts of hydrogen.

@Psychologic
If it wasn't irreparable once the fuel rods started melting, it sure as hell turned into scrap the second they inserted sea water.

@Ornthoron
The third containment layer, the reinforced concrete bubble, won't stop the molten sludge made of uranium and zircaloy indefinatly. From what I know, it's a matter of days at best, if enough rods have melted down. If the entire load melts, if a complete meltdown occurs, that's 60+ tons of uranium alone. No concrete or steel will stop that unless it is cooled externally. That's why they use a large area of graphite-concrete composite material as a core-catcher in EPRs and others.

I always wondered why to my mother that we couldn't just throw all the nuclear waste into a volcano like Kīlauea?? Could we? Have they!?
I think this is a good explanation. FROM INTERNET

Dumping all our nuclear waste in a volcano does seem like a neat solution for destroying the roughly 29,000 tons of spent uranium fuel rods stockpiled around the world. But there’s a critical standard that a volcano would have to meet to properly dispose of the stuff, explains Charlotte Rowe, a volcano geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And that standard is heat. The lava would have to not only melt the fuel rods but also strip the uranium of its radioactivity. “Unfortunately,” Rowe says, “volcanoes just aren’t very hot.”

Lava in the hottest volcanoes tops out at around 2,400˚F. (These tend to be shield volcanoes, so named for their relatively flat, broad profile. The Hawaiian Islands continue to be formed by this type of volcano.) It takes temperatures that are tens of thousands of degrees hotter than that to split uranium’s atomic nuclei and alter its radioactivity to make it inert, Rowe says. What you need is a thermonuclear reaction, like an atomic bomb—not a great way to dispose of nuclear waste.

Volcanoes aren’t hot enough to melt the zirconium (melting point 3,371˚) that encases the fuel, let alone the fuel itself: The melting point of uranium oxide, the fuel used at most nuclear power plants, is 5,189˚. The liquid lava in a shield volcano pushes upward, so the rods probably wouldn’t even sink very deep, Rowe says. They wouldn’t sink at all in a stratovolcano, the most explosive type, exemplified by Washington’s Mount St. Helens. Instead, the waste would just sit on top of the volcano’s hard lava dome—at least until the pressure from upsurging magma became so great that the dome cracked and the volcano erupted. And that’s the real problem.

A regular lava flow is hazardous enough, but the lava pouring out of a volcano used as a nuclear storage facility would be extremely radioactive. Eventually it would harden, turning that mountain’s slopes into a nuclear wasteland for decades to come. And the danger would extend much farther. “All volcanoes do is spew stuff upward,” Rowe says. “During a big eruption, ash and gas can shoot six miles into the air and afterward circle the globe several times. We’d all be in serious trouble.”

He's hooked up to nitrous oxide (laughing gas). It's the same stuff you jack into your engines when you race cars. Coincidence? I think not.

Making obvious my ignorance of science in my formative years, why exactly is a fuel combustion not an explosion?

According to wikipedia, a combustion is the reaction of an oxidant and fuel to create heat and light involving a chemical change whereas is a rapid increase in volume and release of energy potentially caused by a chemical reaction.

Isn't that in some cases ... the same thing?