How Do Nuclear Submarines Make Oxygen [video] | Hacker News Reader

How Do Nuclear Submarines Make Oxygen [video]

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79 pointsthunderbong45 comments

An important fact never explicitly stated in this video is that humans in a contained area will die from CO2 toxicity before lack of oxygen. Many people don't know this or actively believe the opposite.

O2 is ~20% of air, but CO2 is ~.04%. CO2 levels are much more volatile and increase rapidly in sealed spaces with humans.

How do they get the CO2 out of the sub?

CO2 scrubbers

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_scrubber

(Which dumps the CO2 overboard, which is why the sub needs to constantly replenish the amount of oxygen in the air.)

Specifically (at least in the US) amine treatment using Monoethanolamine:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amine_gas_treating

And, while atmosphere CO2 is 400-800ppm, while a bedroom goes up to 1800ppm in the morning (keep your doors open, it gives you headaches), submariners work at 3000ppm permanently.

Consider an air monitor too. I worked in a small enclosed office, and I was surprised at times on how much the co2 levels fluctuated. When it got into 4 digits, I learned to open a window or something to encourage airflow.

That fact alone (along with the CO2 levels on the ISS) has more or less convinced me that the anxiety people have over indoor CO2 levels is an irrational panic. 3000 ppm is actually on the lower side of submarine levels.

My favorite thing about this series is how the sailors look to their CO before answering every question.

Also the cheerful, well positioned shipmates casually blocking access to various parts of the sub as he walks down the corridors.

And the blurred things that were in frame and shouldn’t have been.

I couldn't imagine the USN ever allowing this access on an SSBN, it's amazing enough that they got such great access to a Los Angeles attack class.

TL;DW: normal electrolysis doesn't work because electrolysis with salt water gives you H2 and Cl2 (hydrogen; and chlorine gas, which kills humans). But they desalinate the water and use K-OH (potassium hydroxide) as a catalyst.

The second way is to burn a special candle that is made out of Fe (iron) and NaClO3 (sodium chlorate) , and the heat releases O2 from the NaClO3.

Man, Destin is cool, but a 30 minute video to answer that question?

I agree with your last line, but it’s not just Destin. It’s all of YouTube. The incentive system is driving creators to create longer videos filled with an insane amount of filler content.

I recommend everyone to install the "sponsorblock" youtube addin.

It makes long videos much shorter by cutting out all the filler content (~30% of most videos), and has an option to skip just to the highlight of the video.

For this video, it skips you to 6:52, and within 1 minute you have learned that hydrolysis directly doesn't work due to the salt in salt water, it produces chlorine, and you need to do reverse osmosis first then electrolysis.

It isn't AI... it's just other humans who have tagged and marked the videos - and they have done a pretty good job IMO.

I find myself bothering to click through to YT so rarely (< once/month) it's not really worth installing an addon for this, but it sounds really useful for YT regulars.

What I'd love (and even pay money for) would be the same thing for Spotify podcasts - especially for kids stories which are a constant feature of my car journeys at the moment. 5 minutes of junk surrounding 4 minutes of actual story is madness.

(I already have Spotify Premium - I'm not talking about ads; the actual content of podcasts is mostly fluff, and it's almost as bad as YT)

FWIW, I often end up watching more Doug Demuro and Ian McCollum videos than Destin/SmarterEveryDay. To me, that’s widespread, but not all of YouTube.

Even Doug is kind of creeping into that high 20 minute zone.

That being said, there’s not really a lot of filler in hit stuff.

Oh really? It feels like his format is "I'm going to show you something quirky. Look at this quirky thing. It is so quirky! Imagine designing this quirky thing.", so something that should take 10 seconds takes 50 seconds.

For example here's him telling his viewers, who are most certainly car enthusiasts, what a lift button does: https://youtu.be/BGUqC7QbUDo?t=548

Maybe I’ve just watched too much of him :P

I generally think he does a good job of keeping things moving, with little filler. It just seems that he always ends up around that 25 minute mark.

My interest in the series of Dustin sub videos was diminished by him saying in the first video that for "safety and security reasons" he wasn't going to show anything in the reactor or engine sections... then put on screen a graphic that showed he wasn't going to visit fully half the boat!

I immediately knew this was just going to be a plumbing tour and checked out. Little bit funny to call it a tour of a nuclear submarine but skip anything nuclear.

of course. that would never fly

I mean...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/us-navy-sail...

> Kristian Saucier, of Arlington, Vermont, appeared in federal court in Bridgeport, where a judge also ordered him to serve six months of home confinement with electronic monitoring during a three-year period of supervised release after the prison time. He pleaded guilty in May to unauthorized detention of defense information and had faced five to six years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines.

> Saucier admitted to taking six photos of classified areas inside the USS Alexandria in 2009 when it was in Groton and he was a 22-year-old machinist mate on the submarine. The photos showed the nuclear reactor compartment, the auxiliary steam propulsion panel and the maneuvering compartment, prosecutors said.

> Saucier took the photos knowing they were classified, but did so only to be able to show his family and future children what he did while he was in the Navy, his lawyers said. He denied sharing the photos with any unauthorized recipient.

This just illustrates the DoD's hysterical obsession with secrecy. The US, UK, Russia, France, China and India have nuclear submarines. Brazil is building a nuclear submarine. Australia is buying nuclear submarines.

In 1960 you had a good argument for classifying reactors, but it's ridiculous to pretend the US still has a nuclear monopoly sixty years later. This is declining-empire stuff, a fading power trying to keep up a pretense that has long since grown thin.

To the contrary, the YouTube algorithm strongly discourages it. Longer videos are much less likely to appear in the suggested feed. The degree to which varies, but YouTubers are feeling very heavily forced towards < 5 minute content.

I really think that depends.

I have almost only videos 10+ minutes on my homepage and in my recommendations because I almost only watch longer videos.

https://i.imgur.com/7T5tUGV.png

I haven’t had that experience at all. Though, I rarely use “the algorithm”.

I basically only watch people I’m subscribed to (which I rarely find via YouTube). Those videos are getting increasingly longer because the payouts are higher.

Isn't there a threshold (10 minutes?) where you get twice as many ads and thus people try to make their videos at least that long?

To your last question: the nature of having to attract clicks means youtube creators have to choose reductive titles that tease some particular nugget of information that's going to be discussed, but it seems pretty clear (at least to me) that the intent of this video isn't _just_ to answer that question, and that he expects that his audience will also appreciate a slice-of-life experience of him interacting with the crew and understanding what life is like on the submarine in broader terms than just how they get air.

With respect: if all you wanted was the answer to that question and nothing else, Googling produces it much more quickly than you'd likely ever get from a video, and you might just not be the target audience here. I personally enjoyed the whole series as-is, and it seems from the YouTube comments like many viewers did as well, but obviously YMMV.

Reductive or oxidizing?

Maybe an oxidative title is an inflammatory claim that's not substantiated in the video...

Then the video should be titled "Informative tour of a nuclear submarine". Not focusing on one question.

That was basically the premise of the series. This was one of multiple videos in that series. I don't know about everyone else but a good portion of that video was showing the physical steps taken to make these reactions happen on a sub, which I thought was more interesting than just getting a chemical reaction given as an answer

YouTube is part of the attention economy. Videos do better with click bait titles than they do with bland informative titles.

> To your last question: the nature of having to attract clicks means youtube creators have to choose reductive titles that tease some particular nugget of information that's going to be discussed

To be fair, this video is literally on a nuclear submarine. Walking around and looking at all the stuff is 100% a worthwhile use of my time in my opinion, it's just really cool.

A 1 minute video about it with some animations wouldn't be as interesting to me.

This is entertainment, not pure information.

Yes, I'm with you there. I primarily watch YouTube to unwind; would use a search engine if I just wanted an answer.

Destin is a storyteller. He doesn’t just entertain he draws you in.

Could anyone not say the following:

TL;DR: The answer is "Chemistry". Dustin: video too long.

Only conveying information is not the goal of most media (social, informational, or news).

You're probably not his audience demographic.

From his earlier sub videos it’s very clear he’s having a good time.

But I think there’s a point where you realize you have 3,4 hours of footage and you need to chop it to 18 minutes where you feel guilty leaving bits out, so stuff survives the cutting room floor that shouldn’t.

That could be it but his other videos recently have been over-long too. Paraphrasing:

> "In this video I'm going to try fusing two bullets together but uh, I don't want to 'break the internet' with clickbait so actually 30 minutes of this video will be about me talking about the safety measures I took."

[Spoilers: the bullets didn't fuse.]

It's fine I guess, his videos are usually still worth watching. I just wish the youtube system was better at rewarding concise videos that are as long as they need to be, not rushed or stretched.

He (and his crew)did smack the bullets together, they just shattered instead of fusing. And honestly I agree with him that the safety measures and perseverance stuff is important.

Guy somehow got sailors to let him board their nuclear submarine. I'd say 30 minutes of video wasn't enough.

This is the second day in a row I noticed a link on here directing to “SmarterEveryDay”. Yesterday it was to two bullets being smashed together.

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