nuclear

A professor from Illinois compares the cost of building, fueling and operating a nuclear plant against a natural gas plant, using visual charts. It shows how construction time and interest rates dominate, when the investment pays off and when costs cross over.

Professor Ruzic explains modular micro-reactors: self-contained nuclear units with passive safety whose fuel lasts about 20 years. He covers their use for process and district heat and where they can compete with diesel generation.

A lecture for high school seniors and college freshmen making the case for nuclear power and answering common objections. It is an overview of the channel's more detailed videos on each topic.

Harvard Belfer Center lecture by Matthew Bunn explaining how nuclear bombs work, including fission and fusion weapons and which parts of bomb-making are hard. It is part 1 of 2 in the Nuclear 101 series.

Part 1 of Jean-Marc Jancovici's 2019 course at Ecole des Mines de Paris, on energy and its central role in the economy and climate. It is in French with English subtitles available and runs about two and a half hours.

MIT 22.01 lecture by Michael Short explaining the Chernobyl accident technically, including RBMK reactor positive feedback, xenon poisoning and the cascade of human errors during the test.

Zach Hartwig of MIT introduces the key concepts of magnetic fusion energy and the state of fusion research. He then presents MIT's proposed pathway of using high-field superconducting magnets to build smaller, cheaper tokamaks on a climate-relevant timescale.

An MIT colloquium by Dennis Whyte on power exhaust and first-wall cooling in fusion reactors, including recent innovations and the SPARC and ARC designs.

A roughly three-hour technical livestream Q&A on Helion Energy's fusion approach and the National Ignition Facility. It covers neutron production, shielding, energy recovery, diagnostics and why tokamaks might fare better.

Royal Institution lecture by Dr Kate Lancaster on the most powerful lasers in the world and the extreme conditions they create. It includes live demonstrations and covers applications from industry to fusion.

A 2018 lecture, with subtitles available, by former Finnish intelligence colonel Martti J. Kari on Russian strategic culture. He walks through the historical layers of Russia and explains why the country behaves as it does.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

A 78-minute Richard Feynman lecture of anecdotes about working at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, followed by about ten minutes of audience Q&A in which he tells three safe-cracking stories.

Thomas Ricks's Nimitz Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley asks why US generals did better in World War II than in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq and Afghanistan. A central point is the WWII practice of quickly reassigning or relieving underperforming generals.

A panel at The National WWII Museum on the Battle of Kursk, moderated by Keith Huxen with historians Robert Citino and John Parshal. The discussion covers the armored engagement and the German, Soviet and US approaches to tank production.

Chuck Spinney, a long-time associate of John Boyd, presents Boyd's thinking on the OODA loop and evolutionary epistemology. The talk runs about two and a half hours and includes Q&A.

Jean-Marc Jancovici lectures at ENS Paris on whether energy use, jobs and growth can all be preserved. He argues for a physical approach to economics, since resource depletion and climate limits make perpetual GDP growth unrealistic.