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.