I was joking about the fact that Scott does such a good job of explaining all this that his audience might be able to make a nuclear weapon in the end. I think you need to pick up a hobby or something instead of being angry for no reason on the internet.
Loved the closing pun! Also I loved that line of: “Some argue efficiency is less desirable, because it makes it easier for groups to develop nuclear weapons” , I could imagine the science and engineering team holding a party after some discovery, then someone being like “wait...”!
Leo J. G. Ciaccio ll, That scene in The Pink Panther, but instead of a suitcase full of weapons, your carryon is a Special Atomic Demolitions Device...
Lol. Well, I'm probably on a watch list for the mere fact that I've taken flying lessons. Historically you wouldn't think that matters, but uhh... That whole thing nearly 2 decades ago (you know the one) kinda made being able to fly a plane a point of suspicion. XD Of course, knowing about nuclear physics surely doesn't help either. ... Amongst other things. XD
With that kind of remark, you seem like a person that wouldn't need to be on a plane anyway. Real miniscule in the grand scheme. Kinda like watching videos about nuclear anything. What kind of country do you think you live in? We revoke freedoms for youtube searches? Its not even a good joke.
The first time he said that, on the first video I watched, it scared me out of my wits. Not just bc I know someone who died on Sep-11. He was on the ground though. I also know someone whose husband was on the plane. Flight 93.
Apologies if anyone has already mentioned this -- a few seconds before the 5 minute point in this video, there's a chart that contains the following peculiar line: "Stable elements with no naturally occurring stable isotopes". Somebody at Oak Ridge wasn't paying quite enough attention to what they were doing, and did the verbal equivalent of omitting a minus sign.
Scott Manley. One of the very few people on a utube channel who has the proper formal qualifications to sensibly back up his explanations, in an informative yet very entertaining way. 👍
1 million gee? Beautiful. The lengths we'll go to just to get enriched uranium/plutonium. Also, lasers? We're basically at the point where we need to ask the question: what can't lasers do? Instead of asking what lasers can do.
First, lasers are doing fun shit like disabling UAV’s, removing tattoos, cleaning the Washington monument, etc., Second, we should use thorium and plutonium instead of uranium. For more info check out Sam ‘o nella’s video on thorium
The silex method is so exotic and beautifully clever. They're somehow using hyperpolarized (nuclear spin purified) parahydrogen Raman conversion cells to shift a CO2 laser's wavelength to the precise infrared resonance absorption line of a U235 to F molecular bond. I would love to know how they prevent things like collisional excitation transfer to neighboring U238-F molecular bonds from ruining the efficiency.
They actually are having a real problem with heat causing enough change in the hyperfine structure that efficiency is way bellow what they expected from lab tests. A friend of mine was involved with the early efforts and has her name on a couple of patents for these technologies, and she always tells me she loves in with foreign countries try to invest in covert laser enrichment...because they will fail and it will waste their money!
Does silex exploit hyperfine structure for separation? I know that's how AVLIS works, or rather...worked, since it's been abandoned, but I assumed silex was purely using the molecular IR absorption wavelength shifts due to isotopic mass difference.
Like the video suggests, the details are classified. But many people that have their foot closer to this than I do suggest the core principles are basically the same but with better hardware. The rumor mill suggests the heat noise problem still keeps this needing more and more funding..which is a hard ask in this land of excessively cheap uranium.
Are the details a "Born Secret" type of classification? As I understand the concept it's makes certain information classified even if derived independently and hasn't been tested in court.
Yepp, enriching uranium-235 is the limiting step, which is why heavy water reactors and graphite reactors for producing plutonium from unenriched uranium is so popular.
Just a heads up, but if you ever find yourself in the Pacific North West, you can tour the Hanford B reactor. I grew up across thre river from the bloody thing, and it is open to the public now. Absolutely horrifying how crude the damn thing was.
My dad worked at oak ridge, and I got to visit the experimental reactor during that day they have once every 20 years or something where they can take their families to work. Was really cool seeing the reactor pools from the observatory overhead!
I attended the trade school there and most classes got to see the “swimming” pool reactor. My class missed out on that tour but I did get to take a self-guide Tour of the X 10 reactor by myself. Circa 1981.
Greatest video playlist on TH-cam. These videos remind of my best friend in the US Navy, who was a Nuclear Machinist Mate. We both stood watch at the same time, so between my gauge reading rounds running about our old submarine, I would pick his brain about Nuclear power school and how I was amazed at how we ran our reactor on a theory. Godspeed
Very well done, Scott. I started working at a gaseous diffusion plant in 1990 and went through its shutdown. I have co-workers that worked on Silex and DOE's centrifuge design. Our plant shut down several years ago and we are currently working on D&D.
Dear Scott, I know this might seem like an unusual request, but can you tell us about your daily scalp routine? Are you naturally bald or do you shave to maintain baldness? Any moisturisers or oils recommendation for keeping the scalp healthy? That sort of thing Hope you see this, thanks
My uncle Robert Livingston worked on the proof of concept project of magnetic isotope separation. He was there when the first visible speck of U235 was created. He noted that the distance between the specks of U238 and U235 was about six inches. Thanks for helping me remember him.
Given the value of silver, it seems likely that they spent a good deal more money than the silver was worth to recover the last few fractions of a percent.
@lukey666lukey , yes it has. The price has risen due to the fact we mined all of the big chunks of it. Now, we have to mine lots of material just to get a few grams.
Your knowledge of the nuclear process is amazing. I ve always been fasinated by this and wanted to learn how the nuclei of atoms are made to split and become a different element. I wish the method of creating bombs was never employed but the science of it all is too interesting to ignore. Thanks Scott.
I’m from Oak Ridge, TN my dad worked at K-25, the plant where they enriched the uranium for the atomic bombs. He also worked at Y-12 where they made the warheads for America’s nuclear weapons. They don’t build new ones anymore. They bring in old ones and refurbish them or take them apart and use the nuclear material in medical equipment. My dad died of cancer when I was 10. Not really surprising considering where he worked. He was a good employee and never breathed a word of what he did at work.
@Scott Manley Are you going to at a video about other uses of Uranium such as for medical purposes? (example: U->Mo->Tc) It may not be in your wheel house like the chemistry in this video, but it might be a nice positive video to showcase technologies that have been beneficial rather than destructive.
For my senior science project. I built a full cut away model of a A bomb. My science teacher gave me a B. I told her if I had twenty two pounds of plutonium she be in trouble.
Well depends on the bomb but getting the shape and mixture of the explosives in a classical implosion bomb exactly right is probably some seriously hardcore maths. But you can always do gun-type one. Probably not that hard, just very wasteful if you are limited in your amount of fissile material.
You're right on the gun type being fairly easy, but extremely inefficient. The big problem with implosion isn't the explosive itself, it's getting all the explosive to detonate at the same time. The timers are as highly classified as the centrifuges according to someone I watched a lecture by from the IAEA.
Replying to a comment i saw over small yield nuclear devices. A Yield smaller than the little-boy would still vaporize a city such as DC completely, ie. anything over 10kt is to be considered threatening, as you can add warheads of said yield to a MIRV (*Multiple independently target-able reentry vehicle*) missile. Thus not all of the warhead could be intercepted if deployed before interception. Such that even a small yield will be devastating to an infrastructure and population, since you can have many warheads reach a single target or multiple targets simultaneously.. You may also cause a high amount of damage by encasing the weapon in non fissile nuclear material, thus creating a dirty bomb, which the main effect would be the fallout of said device without destroying much of the infrastructure, but by irradiating the area such that the population has to leave the area. But you can irradiate the area to such a level that it can be easily handled by protective gear during an invasion, and then "cleaned" such that now you have the intact infrastructure without further resistance.
Fabulous, you have uncovered rare items in this series. In this video, at 7:00 we see a photograph inside the massive gaseous diffusion plant. Not many pictures of that. Looking forward to the plutonium 239 production inside the "Queen Mary" size buildings at Hanford. Legend has it the radiation was so intense (the process used robots) inside that plant that the concrete became somewhat "spongelike". Woo!
@scott just curious if anyone has contacted you from the state department after doing all the research for these vids? Another enjoyable video never the less =)
Hey Scott, great series on Nuclear Weapons, learning just how much I don't know about them. I was wondering what happened to Galileo Conquest, hasn't been uploaded in a while. Keep up the good work though!
4:17 - 4:36 I'm not sure whether short tons or metric tonnes were used at the time, but in either case, 36/1000 of 1% of 14700 tons amounts to about 5000 kg
Could a Hilsch Vortex tube do isotopic separation? It produces hot and cold gas based on average kinetic energy of the molecules, but the vortex/cyclone runs at over a million rpm because only the gas rotates. Presumably it could also produce oxygen enriched air on demand.
I study nuclear and I haven't heard of this before! The material seems REALLY limited. Early work seems to indicate not great SWU levels compared to centrifuges, but might just be because it wasn't as fully realized technology? TO THE RESEARCH!
Hi Scott, strange question: there is something i dont understand... in the process of making metallic Pu the entire process is highly radioactive, but the endproduct is only shielded by some vinyl. How does that work???? The slugs are irradiated in a reactor (highly radioactive), then separated in a totally shielded process canyon (PUREX), and the endproduct is extracted at a PFP (Plutonium Finishing Plant) again radioactive like hell, then it gets machined to fit a PIT or a fuellrod, and then its only shielded with some zircalloy tube or some vinyl.... Can you make a video about that?
Given that most U-235/U-238 isotopic enrichment processes, historically, simply separated them based on their relative masses, would those processes, like centrifuge separation, be less effective if you were separating isotopes with a smaller difference in their respective masses? The difference between U-235 & U-238 is three nucleons while the difference between Pu-239 & Pu-240 or U-232 & U-233 is only one nucleon. Would the smaller difference in relative masses of U-232 & U-233 have no impact on the enrichment process or would it require more processing equipment to do the same job, like (just throwing this out there) requiring 3X the number of centrifuges to effectively separate U-232 & U-233 or Pu-239 & Pu-240?
A lot of the non-proliferation arguments seem a bit irrelevant given that some very poor countries (Pakistan, North Korea) have obtained the bomb independently. Furthermore, once you can build your first breeder reactor, un-enriched (or even depleted) uranium can be bred into plutonium and fed back into that same reactor eventually generating excess plutonium for bombs without any enrichment process. Anti-proliferation restrictions on civilian power might have made sense prior to the 80s-90s but if we had gone hard on fission power 20 years ago we might now be enjoying cheap power with the lowest greenhouse gases emissions.
You are correct. Proliferation concerns are mainly a political tool used to stop countries from gaining energy independance or lessen their reliance on foreign imports of energy (uranium being dirt cheap in comparison) and should be more viewed in this context. If a nation state really wants nuclear weapons there is not much the international community can do to stop them, which has been proven on at least 3 occasions so far (India, Pakistan and North Korea).
Correctly if I am wrong but didn't Nort Korea acquire the tech from Pakistan? The nuclear supermarket and all that. And the latter acquiring it after India does not surprise me one bit
Some technical details perhaps. I'm mainly talking about the restrictions on fuel reprocessing and breeding in the U.S. based on the fear that material could be stolen.
We do not know exactly what technology transfer occured between Pakistan and Nortkorea. What was transfered shortened the development time but I am pretty sure the Northkoreans would have gotten there in the end regardless, it would have just taken longer. The are still an embarresment to the nuclear club as their first bomb was a fizzle...
Another great vid thanks! I honestly did a double take when you said 13000 tons of silver wiring!!!! Having said that, one of my customers refines lead, a by product of which is silver, tons of it stored on site!!!
My Dad went to Oak Rige K-25 after getting his physics degree in "47. I remember asking him what the yellow dust on his shoes was. Safety concerns were secondary still at that point.
Both Stuxnet and Flame were aimed at impeding uranium enrichment. IIRC stuxnet closed vents and caused overheating, flame would rapidly speed up and slow down the centrifuges causing them to break.
Closed Paducah, KY gaseous diffusion plant & another plant in Metropolis, IL that had something to do with enrichment a few years ago. Now spending millions on clean up in Paducah. They said they were installing centrifuges in an existing plant in Ohio to replace production.
I know these jokes are fun, but they show a gap in people’s understanding the issue of internet privacy. They track EVERYONE and go back into unregulated databases whenever they feel like it. This “going back” is what most people call being on the list. The issue isn’t the “list”, but the aforementioned mass collection of data/surveillance.
MotherEric I think you overestimate the storage capacity they have and underestimate just how much internet traffic (much of it being completely unstructured data) there is.
If you have the right algorithims and enough processing power, you don't need a ton of storage capacity. But I do agree that "Bol'shoy brat" has more than two noids in the closet. If gov'ts would just focus on running a good ship and keeping their own societies productive and responsible a lot of intelligence issues would be foreshortened if not solved.
Scott: Please do a video sometime about how they get rockets from assembly to the pad? This can include which rockets use different methods, what engineering is required, why you'd choose one method or another. The main methods which come to mind are vertical assembly and transport (e.g. Saturn V), horizontal assembly and transport then rotated vertical on the pad (Falcon, most or all Russian rockets) and assembly on the pad followed by moving the assembly building away prior to launch.
My Physics and Chemistry teachers are getting worried how much I know about making Nuclear bombs. Thanks Scott you are fueling my love of scaring my teachers XD
I just finished my basic thermodynamics course like a week ago which included a little bit of statistical physics and hearing about enriching Uranium using difference in molecule speed gives me headache-inducing flashbacks.
I had a friend back in the 1980’s that worked on laser isotope separation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They had it working well but the program was canceled. Now I know why.
Scott - Check into the role that Mallinckrodt Chemical in St Louis had in initial Uranium ore refinement for the Manhattan Project. Nobody ever talks about it. I live about 90 miles from there and never learned of it until a few months back. A lot of initial Uranium ore refinement was done there (and later at the Weldon Springs, MO site during the Cold War). It's quite interesting.
That we had a 'shortage of copper' is not precisely true. Copper was a strategic material and the amounts required to wind the Calutrons would have attracted notice, while the silver bars were in no particular demand and the knowledge of their use could be easily compartmentalized. It was thus the maintenance of a low-profile for the project that sparked the idea to use the silver for the electromagnetic enrichment project, avoiding the inevitable 'what on earth could they need all that copper for?' questions being asked by people who had no need to know. Silver is a better conductor than Copper, and so there was a minor improvement in the efficiency of the Calutrons. Of course some silver was lost in the production of the wire, but this was done with due care and loss was negligible. Just helping clear a point up is all. Best regards, Jeff.
@@scottmanley I think it would be from one of Richard Rhodes' books? The one I read most recently was The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, but I can't specify the source. I've read several books on the subject over the years and wish I'd made a note outside of the covers of them... At any rate, that is the story as I understand it from my own reading. It was not inferred but actually laid out pretty much as I did in my post. Wish I could help more. I really liked your breakdown of the CalUtron. I knew it was from Caltech and knew it was a cyclotron, but your breakdown gave the derivation perfectly. Thanks! BTW, the making of the Hydrogen Bomb has a ton of info on the fission program, because of course a fission core is the initiator..... So it all starts there.
@@scottmanley AH! Here is one from American Scientist. www.americanscientist.org/article/from-treasury-vault-to-the-manhattan-project which makes reference to the benefit of secrecy the silver's use made vs sourcing a whole lot of suspicious copper. I don't think this was my source, but it does bolster the information: "Not having to divert mass amounts of copper was a huge boon for the project’s secrecy."
I read that companies like beacon power are using carbon fiber centrifuges to store excess renewable energy. Could a pressurised liquid enrichment system be built to provide that function as well?
Environmental tangent. Technically speaking nuclear is a low CO2 energy source, but many who do peer review but don't like nuclear will use poor grade ores or gaseous diffusion methods as the primary enrichment to make these numbers seem poor. Also, many suspect that the R&D needed to get laser enrichment off the ground isn't actually worth it in terms of work units gained. Uranium is already so dirt cheap because of excess weapons down blending distorting markets. Until cold war inventories get depleted and uranium prices start to rise, the history lows don't seem compelling to develop laser enrichment
...and make stuff up like, nuclear power leads to nuclear war every 30 years and the burning cities add to the life cycle CO2-emissions. The peer review process need an upgrade for sure.
#Scott Manley , no mention of the ‘aero dynamic’ centripetal separation method South Africa used for its atomic weapons program? Or was that actually just an application of centrifuges we’ve seen most recently?
He mentioned it in a different comment, but it had to be cut for time. Very interesting and I hadn't ever heard of it before so it was a fun read. Looks like the technology dead-ended, though.
Is Scott s Accent British or Irish? Don't get me wrong ,I love it and understand him better than someone from Chicago, just curious and glad he is here with us in America now! ❤❤❤
Did the Crystal Drano & 33.5%N thing at 13. Thought I was Oppenheimer. Sherrif disagreed. No merit badge for that one. Nowadays I'd still be in jail. No injury or damage except to sister's 1/2 built box kite that made a perfect frame.
Can't think of where to ask this question so ... Would it be possible for nano machines to physically push two nuclei together and cause them to fuse? I know it requires a lot of energy to do it by random chance in a reactor but I figure it may take a lot less energy to physically constrain two nuclei and then force then together, perhaps even by chemical means, e.g. inside a folding protein. Or are the energy requirements orders of magnitude away from that being possible?
Are you ever going to cover the theoretical use of nuclear devices for Orion propulsion? I'd love to hear your take on nuclear "shaped charge" propulsion units.
The conversion of uranium to plutonium actually caused one of the worst nuclear incidents in the UK, the windscale incident. Worthy of a video all to itself
In addition, I would say that keeping secrets is what actually cause the Windscale fire. The Americans knew how graphite would need to be annealed when exposed to am intense neutron flux. We didn't tell the brits this because we both didn't know they needed to know it.
We sussed the Wigner release pretty quick, but yes, that info would have helped still. The entire endeavour was pretty crazy to be frank. We didn't want to be left behind though, and with pending test ban treaties, the UK needed to work fast
Ah, the Zippe centrifuge as designed by Gernot Zippe. I believe that LASEX (an Australian design) is now the most energy efficient. In short, a laser with a frequency that is matched to U235 (slightly different to U238) is used to inject energy into the 235UF6 molecules so they 'boil'. The technology was bought by the US military and details are unknown. Suffice to say that Iran still uses Zippe centrifuges. Although less energy efficient, if one has 'waste' energy in the form of heat, the CHEMEX process might work. I suppose if Iceland wanted to do it, hydrothermal vents would provide the energy. I'm also betting that the magnetic properties of uranium & plutonium have been looked into, the latter especially. It's OK to put Pu239/240/242 into a missile that people don't stand around or a bomb that is mostly in an igloo but I know that US SLBM carriers use 'supergrade' plutonium because the crew have to be around it a lot. I THINK the reason nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles were dropped because the cost of supergrade is so high.
This explains why the new nuclear power people are saying that thorium is a better fuel than uranium 235. It gets turned into uranium within the reactor but separating the uranium U232/233 from the thorium can be done chemically. Much less costly than separating U238 from U325. By the way U232 and U233 are too radioactive to make a nuclear bomb. But within a fully shielded power plant that's not a problem.
Ever since the first episode I've been wondering how many angry or threatening messages or cease and desist orders you've gotten for this series. And how you've handled them. If there's anything there, consider making a full episode on that stuff after the series is done? Have you limited the availability of these episodes in "embargo countries?"
Finally the next step in this "how to" series. At this pace I'll never be a superpower.
5chr4pn3ll superpowers do things themselves, not wait for their favorite internet heroes to give them wikipedia highlights. Stfu.
I was joking about the fact that Scott does such a good job of explaining all this that his audience might be able to make a nuclear weapon in the end.
I think you need to pick up a hobby or something instead of being angry for no reason on the internet.
@@5chr4pn3ll haha...just hope Isis isn't watching!
Loved the closing pun!
Also I loved that line of:
“Some argue efficiency is less desirable, because it makes it easier for groups to develop nuclear weapons”
, I could imagine the science and engineering team holding a party after some discovery, then someone being like “wait...”!
Another fascinating story is where the uranium used in the Manhattan project came from. Hint: not America.
null090909 you're gay
You say "fly safe" but, I really feel like after watching this series I'm not going to be allowed on airplanes anymore. 😔
Leo J. G. Ciaccio ll,
That scene in The Pink Panther, but instead of a suitcase full of weapons, your carryon is a Special Atomic Demolitions Device...
Lol, “fission safe”
Lol. Well, I'm probably on a watch list for the mere fact that I've taken flying lessons.
Historically you wouldn't think that matters, but uhh... That whole thing nearly 2 decades ago (you know the one) kinda made being able to fly a plane a point of suspicion. XD
Of course, knowing about nuclear physics surely doesn't help either.
... Amongst other things. XD
With that kind of remark, you seem like a person that wouldn't need to be on a plane anyway. Real miniscule in the grand scheme. Kinda like watching videos about nuclear anything. What kind of country do you think you live in? We revoke freedoms for youtube searches? Its not even a good joke.
The first time he said that, on the first video I watched, it scared me out of my wits. Not just bc I know someone who died on Sep-11. He was on the ground though. I also know someone whose husband was on the plane. Flight 93.
All the science is fun but the engineering to make it happen is the real magic.
pyropulse String theory turned to be a decades of failure and wasted afford.
scientist discover new worlds. engineers create the world that never was
Amen
Just wait until CERN can "print" gold n stuff
A few more episodes and I'll build my own
Apologies if anyone has already mentioned this -- a few seconds before the 5 minute point in this video, there's a chart that contains the following peculiar line: "Stable elements with no naturally occurring stable isotopes". Somebody at Oak Ridge wasn't paying quite enough attention to what they were doing, and did the verbal equivalent of omitting a minus sign.
Is it supposed to say: "Stable elements with no naturally occurring UNstable isotopes"?
Scott Manley. One of the very few people on a utube channel who has the proper formal qualifications to sensibly back up his explanations, in an informative yet very entertaining way. 👍
Sadly the Codyslab video was removed.
He explained that recently. Was raided by the us government and asked to take all videos about bombs, explosives and nuclear material down.
Can't let the plebians know how to do the fun stuff
@@gradertfamilymakes - No way - I didn't hear anyone talking about that. Do much for the spirit of 1st Amendment, I suppose.
1 million gee?
Beautiful.
The lengths we'll go to just to get enriched uranium/plutonium.
Also, lasers? We're basically at the point where we need to ask the question: what can't lasers do? Instead of asking what lasers can do.
Bad Beard Bill but... Why aren't lasers doing cool shit?
th-cam.com/video/Wecd5S2pr_Q/w-d-xo.html
have doubts in that number))
First, lasers are doing fun shit like disabling UAV’s, removing tattoos, cleaning the Washington monument, etc., Second, we should use thorium and plutonium instead of uranium. For more info check out Sam ‘o nella’s video on thorium
Lasers can do cool shit. Like cooling down gases.
The silex method is so exotic and beautifully clever. They're somehow using hyperpolarized (nuclear spin purified) parahydrogen Raman conversion cells to shift a CO2 laser's wavelength to the precise infrared resonance absorption line of a U235 to F molecular bond. I would love to know how they prevent things like collisional excitation transfer to neighboring U238-F molecular bonds from ruining the efficiency.
They actually are having a real problem with heat causing enough change in the hyperfine structure that efficiency is way bellow what they expected from lab tests. A friend of mine was involved with the early efforts and has her name on a couple of patents for these technologies, and she always tells me she loves in with foreign countries try to invest in covert laser enrichment...because they will fail and it will waste their money!
Does silex exploit hyperfine structure for separation? I know that's how AVLIS works, or rather...worked, since it's been abandoned, but I assumed silex was purely using the molecular IR absorption wavelength shifts due to isotopic mass difference.
Like the video suggests, the details are classified. But many people that have their foot closer to this than I do suggest the core principles are basically the same but with better hardware. The rumor mill suggests the heat noise problem still keeps this needing more and more funding..which is a hard ask in this land of excessively cheap uranium.
I guess that's one of the reasons why their stock price has utterly collapsed to like 20 cents over the past decade.
Are the details a "Born Secret" type of classification? As I understand the concept it's makes certain information classified even if derived independently and hasn't been tested in court.
Yepp, enriching uranium-235 is the limiting step, which is why heavy water reactors and graphite reactors for producing plutonium from unenriched uranium is so popular.
Just a heads up, but if you ever find yourself in the Pacific North West, you can tour the Hanford B reactor. I grew up across thre river from the bloody thing, and it is open to the public now. Absolutely horrifying how crude the damn thing was.
Crude? State-of-the-art in 1945...
Really?
@@yukin1990 Nope.
My dad worked at oak ridge, and I got to visit the experimental reactor during that day they have once every 20 years or something where they can take their families to work. Was really cool seeing the reactor pools from the observatory overhead!
I attended the trade school there and most classes got to see the “swimming” pool reactor. My class missed out on that tour but I did get to take a self-guide Tour of the X 10 reactor by myself. Circa 1981.
Greatest video playlist on TH-cam. These videos remind of my best friend in the US Navy, who was a Nuclear Machinist Mate. We both stood watch at the same time, so between my gauge reading rounds running about our old submarine, I would pick his brain about Nuclear power school and how I was amazed at how we ran our reactor on a theory. Godspeed
Hey dude, it's so nice to come home from work and just watch one of your videos instead of all the man hating stuff. Thanks for being here.
Scott, I bet the FBI agents fight over who gets to monitor you. You are the most entertaining guy to be worried about
Very well done, Scott. I started working at a gaseous diffusion plant in 1990 and went through its shutdown. I have co-workers that worked on Silex and DOE's centrifuge design. Our plant shut down several years ago and we are currently working on D&D.
Dear Scott,
I know this might seem like an unusual request, but can you tell us about your daily scalp routine? Are you naturally bald or do you shave to maintain baldness? Any moisturisers or oils recommendation for keeping the scalp healthy? That sort of thing
Hope you see this, thanks
I shave maybe once a week.
@@scottmanley : God shave the Queen ! j/k
My uncle Robert Livingston worked on the proof of concept project of magnetic isotope separation. He was there when the first visible speck of U235 was created. He noted that the distance between the specks of U238 and U235 was about six inches. Thanks for helping me remember him.
that is absolute amazing that they only lost that much silver
Given the value of silver, it seems likely that they spent a good deal more money than the silver was worth to recover the last few fractions of a percent.
@@Keldor314 im sure the price of silver has risen over time
@lukey666lukey , yes it has. The price has risen due to the fact we mined all of the big chunks of it. Now, we have to mine lots of material just to get a few grams.
Oh I'm sorry. We "lost" a couple of kilos.
You are the best on these explanations, i really enjoy watching this, keep it up Scott.
Initially thought the video was going to cover stuff I already knew about nuclear but there were a lot of interesting details here, good work!
I could listen to your voice all day long. Truly excellent work you do on these videos!
Your knowledge of the nuclear process is amazing.
I ve always been fasinated by this and wanted to learn how
the nuclei of atoms are made to split and become a different element. I wish the method of creating bombs was never employed but the science of it all is too interesting to ignore. Thanks Scott.
Cody's video is crazy, hope he will not be sick in the next decade.
I’m from Oak Ridge, TN my dad worked at K-25, the plant where they enriched the uranium for the atomic bombs. He also worked at Y-12 where they made the warheads for America’s nuclear weapons. They don’t build new ones anymore. They bring in old ones and refurbish them or take them apart and use the nuclear material in medical equipment. My dad died of cancer when I was 10. Not really surprising considering where he worked. He was a good employee and never breathed a word of what he did at work.
@Scott Manley Are you going to at a video about other uses of Uranium such as for medical purposes? (example: U->Mo->Tc) It may not be in your wheel house like the chemistry in this video, but it might be a nice positive video to showcase technologies that have been beneficial rather than destructive.
Just wanted to mention, my professor showed this video in my Nuclear Propulsion class. I got excited to see when "Scott Manley" showed up. :D
YAY, glad to see this series continued (even without CoaDE footage)! Nice job on the research, I learned quite a bit 😉
Worth the wait.
Scott, your enriching at the end made the show the bomb! Great job.....
FINALLY a new episode! Love this series!
For my senior science project. I built a full cut away model of a A bomb. My science teacher gave me a B. I told her if I had twenty two pounds of plutonium she be in trouble.
"Give me an A+ or we're going to discover if my science project works" xD
That’s basically the plot of the 80s move The Manhattan Project.
and thats what this episode was about, building an atom bomb isn't that hard. Refining and enriching the fuel is.
Well depends on the bomb but getting the shape and mixture of the explosives in a classical implosion bomb exactly right is probably some seriously hardcore maths. But you can always do gun-type one. Probably not that hard, just very wasteful if you are limited in your amount of fissile material.
You're right on the gun type being fairly easy, but extremely inefficient. The big problem with implosion isn't the explosive itself, it's getting all the explosive to detonate at the same time. The timers are as highly classified as the centrifuges according to someone I watched a lecture by from the IAEA.
BTW +Scott Manley
Have you ever considered doing a joint project with Issac Arthur?
that's....not how you tag someone but
Replying to a comment i saw over small yield nuclear devices.
A Yield smaller than the little-boy would still vaporize a city such as DC completely, ie. anything over 10kt is to be considered threatening, as you can add warheads of said yield to a MIRV (*Multiple independently target-able reentry vehicle*) missile.
Thus not all of the warhead could be intercepted if deployed before interception.
Such that even a small yield will be devastating to an infrastructure and population, since you can have many warheads reach a single target or multiple targets simultaneously..
You may also cause a high amount of damage by encasing the weapon in non fissile nuclear material, thus creating a dirty bomb, which the main effect would be the fallout of said device without destroying much of the infrastructure, but by irradiating the area such that the population has to leave the area.
But you can irradiate the area to such a level that it can be easily handled by protective gear during an invasion, and then "cleaned" such that now you have the intact infrastructure without further resistance.
Finally. Was wondering what happened to this series...
Hey Scott, I met you in a Team Fortress 2 lobby 8 years ago. Glad to see u still making videos
AshGreninjaBC, I never knew he played TF2!
Mystery Man - He breaths air and does not perform photosynthesis. It's pretty fair to say that he almost certainly played TF2.
Operator 801 sorry to kill your hypothesis, but ive never played tf2.
milkbox you must be a plant.
Sheldon Robertson it happens to everyone im sure, but you typed that in the comment field, instead of the search box.
10:20 - I thought it was a _proven fact_ that Stuxnet was built for sabotaging the Iranian nuclear programme?
Fabulous, you have uncovered rare items in this series. In this video, at 7:00 we see a photograph inside the massive gaseous diffusion plant. Not many pictures of that. Looking forward to the plutonium 239 production inside the "Queen Mary" size buildings at Hanford. Legend has it the radiation was so intense (the process used robots) inside that plant that the concrete became somewhat "spongelike". Woo!
@scott just curious if anyone has contacted you from the state department after doing all the research for these vids? Another enjoyable video never the less =)
LOVE this series! Could go for 10 more episodes 😉
Just the thought of electro lazering different atoms into different containers hurts my head. Like HTF? Amazing series!!!!
Scott. Thank you so much. For your intellect and drive to inform. You are an amazing transmitter of information.
Hey Scott, great series on Nuclear Weapons, learning just how much I don't know about them. I was wondering what happened to Galileo Conquest, hasn't been uploaded in a while. Keep up the good work though!
I found this Outstanding Channel searching YT for the word "urchine" !!!
Finally part 6!! Cant wait to watch when I have time this evening!! :D
Thanks professor, this series is fascinating, I can't wait for part 7 and beyond.
I would watch an episode about how they get the material into the final form. How do they get it into a sphere?
I think they add a small amount of gallium and then press it into a mold not 100% sure tho
4:17 - 4:36 I'm not sure whether short tons or metric tonnes were used at the time, but in either case, 36/1000 of 1% of 14700 tons amounts to about 5000 kg
Could a Hilsch Vortex tube do isotopic separation? It produces hot and cold gas based on average kinetic energy of the molecules, but the vortex/cyclone runs at over a million rpm because only the gas rotates.
Presumably it could also produce oxygen enriched air on demand.
South Africa used something like this, but I had to leave it out.
OK, and thanks for confirming I'm not the only one to have that idea.
I study nuclear and I haven't heard of this before! The material seems REALLY limited. Early work seems to indicate not great SWU levels compared to centrifuges, but might just be because it wasn't as fully realized technology? TO THE RESEARCH!
I admire how every society builds its most dangerous facilities RIGHT NEXT TO THE WATER! Spreading the "love".
Anything that generates power is safest if there’s a large body of water to help with cooling. It’s an intentional choice for safety and efficiency.
Yessss i missed this series more than you know scott!
How can one man know so much. True inspiration right here!
Yeah very interesting
Hi Scott, strange question: there is something i dont understand... in the process of making metallic Pu the entire process is highly radioactive, but the endproduct is only shielded by some vinyl. How does that work???? The slugs are irradiated in a reactor (highly radioactive), then separated in a totally shielded process canyon (PUREX), and the endproduct is extracted at a PFP (Plutonium Finishing Plant) again radioactive like hell, then it gets machined to fit a PIT or a fuellrod, and then its only shielded with some zircalloy tube or some vinyl.... Can you make a video about that?
Given that most U-235/U-238 isotopic enrichment processes, historically, simply separated them based on their relative masses, would those processes, like centrifuge separation, be less effective if you were separating isotopes with a smaller difference in their respective masses? The difference between U-235 & U-238 is three nucleons while the difference between Pu-239 & Pu-240 or U-232 & U-233 is only one nucleon. Would the smaller difference in relative masses of U-232 & U-233 have no impact on the enrichment process or would it require more processing equipment to do the same job, like (just throwing this out there) requiring 3X the number of centrifuges to effectively separate U-232 & U-233 or Pu-239 & Pu-240?
A lot of the non-proliferation arguments seem a bit irrelevant given that some very poor countries (Pakistan, North Korea) have obtained the bomb independently. Furthermore, once you can build your first breeder reactor, un-enriched (or even depleted) uranium can be bred into plutonium and fed back into that same reactor eventually generating excess plutonium for bombs without any enrichment process.
Anti-proliferation restrictions on civilian power might have made sense prior to the 80s-90s but if we had gone hard on fission power 20 years ago we might now be enjoying cheap power with the lowest greenhouse gases emissions.
You are correct. Proliferation concerns are mainly a political tool used to stop countries from gaining energy independance or lessen their reliance on foreign imports of energy (uranium being dirt cheap in comparison) and should be more viewed in this context. If a nation state really wants nuclear weapons there is not much the international community can do to stop them, which has been proven on at least 3 occasions so far (India, Pakistan and North Korea).
Correctly if I am wrong but didn't Nort Korea acquire the tech from Pakistan? The nuclear supermarket and all that. And the latter acquiring it after India does not surprise me one bit
Some technical details perhaps. I'm mainly talking about the restrictions on fuel reprocessing and breeding in the U.S. based on the fear that material could be stolen.
We do not know exactly what technology transfer occured between Pakistan and Nortkorea. What was transfered shortened the development time but I am pretty sure the Northkoreans would have gotten there in the end regardless, it would have just taken longer.
The are still an embarresment to the nuclear club as their first bomb was a fizzle...
Plutonium based weapons are much more complicated to design than uranium based weapons
Such a bombastic series.
Another great vid thanks! I honestly did a double take when you said 13000 tons of silver wiring!!!! Having said that, one of my customers refines lead, a by product of which is silver, tons of it stored on site!!!
My Dad went to Oak Rige K-25 after getting his physics degree in "47. I remember asking him what the yellow dust on his shoes was. Safety concerns were secondary still at that point.
I have driven by the Hanford site many times along the highway... An unbelievable number of mounds for material storage in neat rows
Both Stuxnet and Flame were aimed at impeding uranium enrichment. IIRC stuxnet closed vents and caused overheating, flame would rapidly speed up and slow down the centrifuges causing them to break.
Closed Paducah, KY gaseous diffusion plant & another plant in Metropolis, IL that had something to do with enrichment a few years ago. Now spending millions on clean up in Paducah. They said they were installing centrifuges in an existing plant in Ohio to replace production.
It is so hard to watch the Cody's video these days
My enjoyment of this video was amplified once I recognized my favorite ksp guys voice lol
Part 6 and we had gotten to enrichment... I have a feeling that we'll get to engines only after they'd finally get to be tested irl. Part 73?
Part 42 or 69. One or the other.
Did anybody else find something called "NSAtool.exe" running in their task manager? meh, can't be too serious I guess.
Mirodin ci think you're good. Pretty sure its a default 👌🏻
I know these jokes are fun, but they show a gap in people’s understanding the issue of internet privacy.
They track EVERYONE and go back into unregulated databases whenever they feel like it.
This “going back” is what most people call being on the list.
The issue isn’t the “list”, but the aforementioned mass collection of data/surveillance.
MotherEric I think you overestimate the storage capacity they have and underestimate just how much internet traffic (much of it being completely unstructured data) there is.
If you have the right algorithims and enough processing power, you don't need a ton of storage capacity.
But I do agree that "Bol'shoy brat" has more than two noids in the closet. If gov'ts would just focus on running a good ship and keeping their own societies productive and responsible a lot of intelligence issues would be foreshortened if not solved.
HuntingTarg you do if you want to "look back" at it all as mothereric suggests.
You don't if you apply selectors and collect only what you want.
Scott: Please do a video sometime about how they get rockets from assembly to the pad? This can include which rockets use different methods, what engineering is required, why you'd choose one method or another. The main methods which come to mind are vertical assembly and transport (e.g. Saturn V), horizontal assembly and transport then rotated vertical on the pad (Falcon, most or all Russian rockets) and assembly on the pad followed by moving the assembly building away prior to launch.
Didn't you ask this a week ago?
Yes but I didn't know if you'd seen it so I decided one more try. Thanks for noticing,
There is also the separation nozzle process which uses microfluidic nozzles to separate the different isotopes.
Hey! The Long Dark t-shirt! Good to see other people playing the game as well
Dear Scott ...you are awesome...god bless you.
My Physics and Chemistry teachers are getting worried how much I know about making Nuclear bombs. Thanks Scott you are fueling my love of scaring my teachers XD
I just finished my basic thermodynamics course like a week ago which included a little bit of statistical physics and hearing about enriching Uranium using difference in molecule speed gives me headache-inducing flashbacks.
I had a friend back in the 1980’s that worked on laser isotope separation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. They had it working well but the program was canceled. Now I know why.
Scott you should come and visit Hanford they have B-Reactor tours and you could also visit LIGO
Seems like the video from Cody is no longer available?
You can still get it using the wayback machine, although its player doesn't work properly so you'd probably have to download it
5:53, You mean 100kWhrs/SWU, not 100kW/SWU. (Great videos, love them).
Scott - Check into the role that Mallinckrodt Chemical in St Louis had in initial Uranium ore refinement for the Manhattan Project. Nobody ever talks about it. I live about 90 miles from there and never learned of it until a few months back. A lot of initial Uranium ore refinement was done there (and later at the Weldon Springs, MO site during the Cold War). It's quite interesting.
Starting in the late 50's a majority of the US enrichment happened at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion plant.
That we had a 'shortage of copper' is not precisely true. Copper was a strategic material and the amounts required to wind the Calutrons would have attracted notice, while the silver bars were in no particular demand and the knowledge of their use could be easily compartmentalized. It was thus the maintenance of a low-profile for the project that sparked the idea to use the silver for the electromagnetic enrichment project, avoiding the inevitable 'what on earth could they need all that copper for?' questions being asked by people who had no need to know. Silver is a better conductor than Copper, and so there was a minor improvement in the efficiency of the Calutrons. Of course some silver was lost in the production of the wire, but this was done with due care and loss was negligible. Just helping clear a point up is all. Best regards, Jeff.
This sounds great, do you have citations for this?
@@scottmanley I think it would be from one of Richard Rhodes' books? The one I read most recently was The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, but I can't specify the source. I've read several books on the subject over the years and wish I'd made a note outside of the covers of them... At any rate, that is the story as I understand it from my own reading. It was not inferred but actually laid out pretty much as I did in my post. Wish I could help more. I really liked your breakdown of the CalUtron. I knew it was from Caltech and knew it was a cyclotron, but your breakdown gave the derivation perfectly. Thanks! BTW, the making of the Hydrogen Bomb has a ton of info on the fission program, because of course a fission core is the initiator..... So it all starts there.
@@scottmanley AH! Here is one from American Scientist. www.americanscientist.org/article/from-treasury-vault-to-the-manhattan-project which makes reference to the benefit of secrecy the silver's use made vs sourcing a whole lot of suspicious copper. I don't think this was my source, but it does bolster the information: "Not having to divert mass amounts of copper was a huge boon for the project’s secrecy."
I read that companies like beacon power are using carbon fiber centrifuges to store excess renewable energy. Could a pressurised liquid enrichment system be built to provide that function as well?
Environmental tangent. Technically speaking nuclear is a low CO2 energy source, but many who do peer review but don't like nuclear will use poor grade ores or gaseous diffusion methods as the primary enrichment to make these numbers seem poor. Also, many suspect that the R&D needed to get laser enrichment off the ground isn't actually worth it in terms of work units gained. Uranium is already so dirt cheap because of excess weapons down blending distorting markets. Until cold war inventories get depleted and uranium prices start to rise, the history lows don't seem compelling to develop laser enrichment
I just know their talking points still resinate
Some nuclear reactor designs work with unenriched uranium.
...and make stuff up like, nuclear power leads to nuclear war every 30 years and the burning cities add to the life cycle CO2-emissions. The peer review process need an upgrade for sure.
Ya, Jacobson's work is a joke in that area.
#Scott Manley , no mention of the ‘aero dynamic’ centripetal separation method South Africa used for its atomic weapons program? Or was that actually just an application of centrifuges we’ve seen most recently?
He mentioned it in a different comment, but it had to be cut for time. Very interesting and I hadn't ever heard of it before so it was a fun read. Looks like the technology dead-ended, though.
Is Scott s Accent British or Irish? Don't get me wrong ,I love it and understand him better than someone from Chicago, just curious and glad he is here with us in America now! ❤❤❤
Series continues, nice! Instant Like!
now this has just greatly enriched my knowledge. --- and put me on most of the watchlists I wasn't already on.
You deserve an award
There is also U233 which you get by breeding with Thorium. M
Not Ankarsk, but AnGarsk - town, named by Angara river.
Great series I was fearing you put it down
I feel like NSA is going to show up at my door for watching these lol. All joking aside Awesome job! this series has been fascinating
Thanks for the info. Now I'm step further into my 'project'.
Did the Crystal Drano & 33.5%N thing at 13. Thought I was Oppenheimer. Sherrif disagreed. No merit badge for that one. Nowadays I'd still be in jail. No injury or damage except to sister's 1/2 built box kite that made a perfect frame.
Can't think of where to ask this question so ...
Would it be possible for nano machines to physically push two nuclei together and cause them to fuse? I know it requires a lot of energy to do it by random chance in a reactor but I figure it may take a lot less energy to physically constrain two nuclei and then force then together, perhaps even by chemical means, e.g. inside a folding protein.
Or are the energy requirements orders of magnitude away from that being possible?
Are you ever going to cover the theoretical use of nuclear devices for Orion propulsion? I'd love to hear your take on nuclear "shaped charge" propulsion units.
The conversion of uranium to plutonium actually caused one of the worst nuclear incidents in the UK, the windscale incident. Worthy of a video all to itself
In addition, I would say that keeping secrets is what actually cause the Windscale fire. The Americans knew how graphite would need to be annealed when exposed to am intense neutron flux. We didn't tell the brits this because we both didn't know they needed to know it.
We sussed the Wigner release pretty quick, but yes, that info would have helped still. The entire endeavour was pretty crazy to be frank. We didn't want to be left behind though, and with pending test ban treaties, the UK needed to work fast
Ya, now yall are leaders in graphite...for better or worse!
Ah, the Zippe centrifuge as designed by Gernot Zippe. I believe that LASEX (an Australian design) is now the most energy efficient. In short, a laser with a frequency that is matched to U235 (slightly different to U238) is used to inject energy into the 235UF6 molecules so they 'boil'.
The technology was bought by the US military and details are unknown. Suffice to say that Iran still uses Zippe centrifuges.
Although less energy efficient, if one has 'waste' energy in the form of heat, the CHEMEX process might work. I suppose if Iceland wanted to do it, hydrothermal vents would provide the energy.
I'm also betting that the magnetic properties of uranium & plutonium have been looked into, the latter especially. It's OK to put Pu239/240/242 into a missile that people don't stand around or a bomb that is mostly in an igloo but I know that US SLBM carriers use 'supergrade' plutonium because the crew have to be around it a lot.
I THINK the reason nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles were dropped because the cost of supergrade is so high.
This explains why the new nuclear power people are saying that thorium is a better fuel than uranium 235. It gets turned into uranium within the reactor but separating the uranium U232/233 from the thorium can be done chemically. Much less costly than separating U238 from U325.
By the way U232 and U233 are too radioactive to make a nuclear bomb. But within a fully shielded power plant that's not a problem.
Love the series and all your content. Thanks so much for the share.
Ever since the first episode I've been wondering how many angry or threatening messages or cease and desist orders you've gotten for this series. And how you've handled them. If there's anything there, consider making a full episode on that stuff after the series is done? Have you limited the availability of these episodes in "embargo countries?"
... a sort of "behind the scenes" episode...
There's nothing in this series that's restricted, so no official contacts. Only problem has been demonetization which takes a day or so to get sorted.
Scott what kinda work do you do, scientist, physicist?, professor.?
I used a Chemex to brew my coffee this morning. Should I be worried about irradiation?
Why would I ever ring the bell when I could just wait five years and consume it all at once?