Your video, Mike Cooper's Chain Reaction, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Fair point. I barely consider reactors that need control rods as a legitimate design, there are much better ways to build a reactor that doesn't need to depend on such things for safety. Basic design using a molten salt core should be more than enough, and in any case none of them are anywhere near the chain reaction that would be in a nuclear bomb.

As an aside, I've often thought the US Power Grid is overly unstable and an overly easy target for terrorist groups. Knock out a few sub stations (okay, more than a few, one or two in major cities) with a small blast, and no need to lose lives with said blast, and the grid would fall apart from there in a chain reaction. Things would be hampered further by the fact we don't have a good number of backups of transformers and other equipment to replace many of them that would be damaged directly and via cascade failure. That's why I never understood Republican calls for the Keystone XL, aside from oil lobby money, when fixing the grid would create far more jobs, both short term and long term, and increase our safety as well. A major outage would cause far more panic and damage than the 9/11 attacks thanks to how much we rely on electricity, and if enough damage was done to the system, it could take weeks to months for the system to be patched back up. The electrical grid NEEDS fixed, and soon.

I was really expecting the pyramid to be only the beginning of a chain reaction involving automatic sprinklers.

If this comment section's now going to be a big chain reaction, let me be critical and go fission for laughs too.

Sure would like to know what the exact cause of the panic is. Fear of disease (sickness)? Some cultural bad luck thing? Possible poising(fear of terrorist gassing)? Also was it just some kind of panicked chain reaction, and is this a common reaction or a one off? So many questions!

Hi Notarobot, your argument is unfortunately based on a very common misunderstanding of the chemistry of water and salt.

I can assure you that it is an established scientific fact that pure water has the highest heat capacity per unit of its mass compared to any water solutions. The less water there is in a water solution, the less heat capacity that solution has. This is because the temperature of pure water is more proportional to the amount of energy contained within it, which is due to the flexibility of its molecular structure. The more salt you add to water, the less structural flexibility (i.e. purity) there is to distribute and contain energy as the temperature increases. To put it another way, the salt molecules weigh down and restrict the water molecules from moving as freely, which is why salt water has a higher boiling point.

So in fact the more fresh water that is introduced to the oceans, the higher heat capacity and heat conduction there will be.

Furthermore, you grossly oversimplify the problem of climate change by assuming the only change that matters is immediately perceptible to "mammals like us". One of the biggest issues is that even slight variations in temperature can drastically change entire marine ecosystems. If enough ecosystems collapse, it will cause a chain reaction that will be very, very difficult to manage, let alone recover from. Also, even slight variations in salinity can drastically change ocean currents, which in turn affects not just marine ecosystems, but weather patterns throughout the world as well.

I can tell you're an intelligent person, so I hope you'll take me seriously when I say that it's very, very important for all intelligent people to be as diligent as possible when referring to the scientific causes and effects of climate change. Advocate whatever position you'd like as to how we should go about things, but please do your best to validate the information you're using to do so.

Now that it's possible to upload the process to the internet and make it impossible to 'hide', I would agree, it can't be 'hidden' by outside forces unless the inventor never reveals the process. It can be underfunded by the direction of those that won't benefit.
I don't think Chain Reaction (the movie) was believable, I think the process would have been copied by someone in the group and released online, not hidden and stolen by the feds and big oil.

Both @Chairman_woo and @Rawhead are 100% correct.

Traffic behaves like a wave. Canceling the amplitude (not stopping and going all the time, rather going a constant speed) reduces the chain reaction.

If you really want to know the chain reaction happens because people are no machines. They need time to reaccelerate once stopped. This time adds up.

Here is an example of this: http://videosift.com/video/Traffic-Jam-Simulation

@scheherazade it's not about keeping space in front of you. It's about going a constant speed. You're parking lot theory seems to stem from playing Sim City too much.
I do realize less cars = less traffic. But jams will still occur. You just need two cars.

IDK why you guys cant see or understand what this dude is saying.

Stop and go, stop and go traffic starts a chain reaction that just waves along in reverse FOREVER. If everybody was to move along at a slow, steady, and constant speed, traffic would clear up very quickly.

I am a truck driver, and my motto has always been. If people would think collectively, instead of independently. there would be no such thing as traffic.

Wolf Howling Chain Reaction has been added as a related post - related requested by ant on that post.

Wolf Howling Chain Reaction has been added as a related post - related requested by ant on that post.

That's interesting... I wasn't aware of that. It seems Nazi policies and distaste for "Jew Science" greatly slowed their nuclear research down, but they were still making fast progress on it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_energy_project

"In the late 1930s, Germany might very well have had a 5-year lead on the West in [atomic weaponry]. ... [But] Manhattan did go forward, first and foremost as a counter to the feared German development [of atomic weaponry]." Google Books: How to lose a War.

The following thread isn't a primary source, but it's enough to make me think more research would probably find similar conclusions to the commenters:

Germany was working on nuclear bombs and reactors. German scientists Hahn, Meitner and Stassmann discovered the nuclear chain reaction in uranium in 1939. One reason Albert Einstein wrote FDR lobbying for an all out effort to make an atomic bomb was he got letter from German friends saying we know how to make atomic explosions for Gods sake hurry up. Einstein got through to FDR and we know were this ended up. In Germany they put their best man in charge a theorist named Werner von Heisenberg...

Reviving a super long dead convo, but it turns out you were WAAAY right. The reactor portion for these systems are still 99% critical, the accelerator is just providing a drastically small portion of neutrons. The less it provides the better return on energy, because like you said, the accelerator isn't running for free. If proton beams become cheaper in both capital costs and energy demands, perhaps their neutrons would be easier to design for than via chain reaction via moderation methods, but I don't see that happening soon, if ever. This might be one of those neat, but dumb things

>> ^FlowersInHisHair:

I thought they looked like a crowd of somewhat depressed people at the end. Weird?


They always look like congregations of church goers to me. Very sad either way.