12 Gauge Dragon's Breath AT NIGHT!- Smarter Every Day 2

[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 Celsius 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 its 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 caused all kinds of problems.

So anyway, now you're Smarter Every Day, and if you would help me out, I'd appreciate it 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.