Nuclear Engineer reacts to Kurzgesagt "What if We Detonated All Nuclear Bombs at Once?"

I'm Tyler Fultz, I'm a

nuclear

engineer

with just over 10 years of experience in the commercial

nuclear

power industry, from

engineer

ing to operations, capital projects and emergency response. I don't claim to know everything there is to know about nuclear energy, but I can certainly share some knowledge if you like my videos, leave me a Like at the bottom and hit the Subscribe button to find out when new videos appear. If you didn't like it, leave me some suggestions Below in the comments on how it can be improved today we are going to watch another video by kurz gazad this one is called

what

happens if we detonate all the nuclear weapons at

once

?

This should be interesting, let's take a look. Many of our viewers have asked us a very serious question. Question: What would happen if we made a big pile of

bombs

and exploded all the nuclear weapons in the world at

once

? Oddly enough, we couldn't find a good source to answer this question to our satisfaction, so we rounded up some scientists to tell the tale. I love you all. the little cartoon birds they use for everything it's amazing

what

would happen and we would find an answer to this extremely important scientific problem once and for all apparently there are 15,000 nuclear weapons on Earth, the US and Russia have about 7,000 , while France China the United Kingdom Palestine India Israel and North Korea possess around 1,000 between them, but how much destructive power used to be more than that during the height of the Cold War, I think it was something on the order of 20 to 25,000

bombs

in total for this really.

Let's try to put these figures in perspective, on Earth there are around 4,500 cities or urban areas with at least one hundred thousand inhabitants, some are larger than others, so we will assume that, on average, we need three nuclear bombs to completely annihilate a city. . This means that we could destroy every single city on planet Earth with our nuclear arsenal, killing over three billion people, about half of humanity in an instant, and still have 1,500 nuclear weapons left that an expert would call Overkill so we can say with We trust that we have many nuclear weapons, so they can cause a lot of damage, but what if we make a huge pile of the 15,000 bombs and pull the trigger?

Let's drop our nuclear pile in the middle of the Amazon jungle just to show nature. whose boss I love that description it's an interesting idea, can we cause more destruction or less destruction by concentrating everything in one place instead of scattering it everywhere? Let's see what they can come up with with randomly stacked warheads that fit in a small warehouse, a typical US warhead has the power of 200,000 tons of TNT, so 15,000 warheads would be the equivalent of 3 billion tons of TNT to scale. This is enough to rebuild the entire island of Manhattan with every building and skyscraper using stacks of TNT, the closest thing we can compare.

Because of the energy gathered here it is a volcano. One of the deadliest volcanic eruptions in history took place in 1883 on the island of Krakatoa. The eruption was so powerful that seventy percent of the island and the surrounding archipelago were destroyed, killing tens of thousands of people. The effects were felt around the world for days after the event. Our nuclear pile contains 15 times the energy of the Krakatoa volcanic eruption, so let's finally press button three, two, one, in one second, a fireball 50 kilometers in diameter vaporizes everything in its path and creates an explosion. wave that flattens three thousand square kilometers of forest well done the fraction of a second um flash followed by the thermal pulse and then comes the shock wave I like every living thing within 250 kilometers will start to burn the explosion will be heard literally around the world As the pressure wave circles the Earth dozens of times over the next few weeks, millions of tons of incinerated material are catapulted into the atmosphere.

The mushroom cloud reaches the outer reaches of the stratosphere, pushing against space itself after things have calmed down. 10 kilometers wide lies in the center of the worst global fires the planets have seen in millennia spreading across South America burning forests and cities alike and now begins the nasty slash of extremely radioactive material that will kill living beings very quickly and a large area of ​​several kilometers. Around the crater is now uninhabitable, just as everyone depends on how closely things in the immediate area are going to receive the worst of the fallout. Many of the things that have been blown by the wind will be significantly more diluted, but for hundreds of kilometers. downwind The consequences are carried high in the atmosphere by the mushroom cloud and transported throughout the planet.

The amount of radioactive material in the environment is doubling worldwide, which isn't the end of civilization yet, but we may see more cancer for a while. A portion of the particles will do so. Flow until the end. I buy it, as I said, it diluted space for years and caused a nuclear winter that could reduce global temperatures by a few degrees for a few years. This explosion was pretty bad if you are in South America and especially Brazil, the Amazon rainforest. It's pretty much history, which isn't great, but human life will continue, but what if we explode more nuclear weapons so the answer to the question is significantly less devastating if you put them all in one place than if you attack all the important cities in the world why that?

It would have caused much more widespread chaos. Yes, this would still be horrible, but not as bad as, say, a nuclear war targeting several major cities that would use just as many guns and buttons. Suppose humanity decided Mike. There is that green glow again in each uranium particle. on Earth and build as many nuclear bombs as possible our current use is a giant green rock, wow that's not what uranium looks like, uranium in its natural state is yellow, actually the term yellowcake uranium is all about how it looks, but I can say it with curves. because they're clearly making this giant green rock just for fun.

It is estimated that there are around 35 million tons of uranium in the Earth's crust, enough to fuel human civilization for more than 2,000 years or to build millions of nuclear warheads, for argument's sake. Let's say we create a stack with the power of 10 billion Hiroshima bombs that forms a three-kilometer-high cube containing approximately the energy of the asteroid impact that ended the age of dinosaurs 65 million years ago, except which is also nuclear three at this point. The shorter year of radiation is worrying. This will surely be an extinction level event. Two. One. Our pile explodes in South America with so much power that the ground just splashes like water, cratering 100 kilometers across Bedrock on the scale of entire mountain ranges.

It vaporizes in an instant as thousands of tons of material are catapulted at such speed that they are ejected into space, some leaving Earth forever. While most of it falls as rain in the form of hot debris that heats the atmosphere to oven-like temperatures and kills most large animals. and causing firestorms around the world the earth's crust rings like a bell struck by global earthquakes stronger than anything in recorded history decimating cities around the world as hurricane winds crush every tree in South America and forest fires consume the continent the abundance of hydrocarbons in the Amazon is burned to form ash that is released into the atmosphere shooting arrows into the sky and preventing sunlight from reaching the surface, causing temperatures to reach almost the freezing point throughout the world.

The ensuing global winter can last for decades and results in the extinction of all large animal species, including humans. Basically a Redux of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, yes we mentioned that every corner of the planet is covered in radioactive fallout, but at this point it doesn't matter much anymore, this is humanity's extinction event. We asked them how they show what's on board in the Cockroaches. The International Space Station may enjoy a great view for a while, but it's not unlikely that rock explosions will always destroy the station. Those who are lucky enough to be in bunkers or submarines deep beneath the ocean surface.

They can survive longer before they exhaust their food supplies and have to venture out to find more, they will find the world to be a frozen, charred radioactive wasteland, the planet itself doesn't care at all after a few million years, the wounds from the explosions have healed and life is thriving, possibly even more so than when humans are present, if intelligent life emerges again, they might be able to discover what happened when they studied geology, they will find a strange, very thin layer of rock that covers the entire world, enriched in radioactive elements such as uranium and others.

Nasty things that break down still wouldn't be cool, but this is an interesting version of it mixed with rare earth metals and plastics that humans used. They would probably be very, very confusing. Videos like this take over 1200 hours to finish. It's an interesting thought experiment and just looking here they clearly put a lot of effort into these videos, check out Chris Gazette if you haven't already, they put an incredible amount of work into not only the calculations they did but also the animations . The voice acts. scripts everything um this was very well done I know they put the green, the green things for laughs and I always have to mention that, uh, but yeah, your math that's off the top of my head sounds good in terms of how devastating they all are. . nuclear weapons and then of course it's a late hypothetical scenario if we used everything we know to make as many nuclear weapons as possible.

Yes, we could become an extinction-level event, but that would require much, much more. energy and we should really use that effort to promote human progress as they suggested in terms of colonizing the rest of the solar system or improving the lives of everyone else, but yeah, that whole classic question of how much potential you have and what you want to do. with that thank you very much for seeing us see you next time