[music]
OK, so we are about to demonstrate
Dragon's Breath ammo, the ultimate in muzzle flash, and we got
the most manly person we know, John to do it, John can you hear us? - yeah
-Are you ready? - Ready.
3..2..1.. [bang] [laugh]
[music]
What if you catch yourself on fire?
[bang] [laughs]
Fantastic!
3.. 2.. 1.. Fire
- Holy Crap. - That's amazing.
Aah, that's the shot right there.
Look at this. - Ow man.
3..2..1..
Alright, man play with fire time is over.
It's time for you to get Smarter Every Day. So I've obtained a document
made by the US Department of Energy back in 1984 reviewing Zirconium
Zircaloy Pyrophoricity. This is important because this is what's used in
Dragon's Breath ammunition. This is a little different than normal tracer ammunition which uses
magnesium or phosphorous if you're an American, or barium salts if you're Chinese
or Russian. So this document reveals how
Zirconium is actually ignited. Way on down here on page
19, there's a graph that shows how ignition temperature
in Celcius is a function of log specific area
which is the external surface area of the particle of zirconium
ratioed with the mass. So basically as the particle
gets smaller, the ignition temperature gets much easier.
So you can see that inversely proportional here.
So, why do we care about that. Well it's just interesting.
Another thing that's interesting about zirconium is, well, on the periodic table it's
way over here, it's very similar to hafnium, it has some of the similar characteristics.
One thing that's neat about zirconium is that it doesn't care about neutrons
at all. Neutrons zip right through it, and it doesn't absorb neutrons very
much at all, which makes it very very nice for the nuclear industry.
It's also very low in terms of it's reaction to
corrosives, so it's used as cladding for nuclear
reactor fuels. The reason being is the neutrons go through and that
energy doesn't get absorbed. This is interesting until
you have a Fukushima type incident, and when you do
start increasing temperature, like we saw earlier on that
chart, you start to get some reactions. As you can see here
one of the byproducts of that reaction is hydrogen,
often gas. This is what happened at Fukushima. It built up hydrogen gas
when the zirconium started heating up, and reacting, and that
is what detonated. That detonated and causes all
kinds of problems. So anyway, now you're Smarter Every Day, and
if you would help me out, I'd appreciate if you'd pass this along to some of your smart buddies
or people who like guns and see if you can help me get some
subscribers. I would greatly appreciate that. Have a great day. Bye.
[ Captions by Andrew Jackson ] captionsbyandrew.wordpress.com
Captioning in different languages welcome. Please contact Destin if you can help.