3:10 I was quite wrong about this. Thanks so much for pointing this out in the comments! I appreciate you keeping my facts straight! Uranium does eventually decay into Radon. So does Thorium, but in much lower quantities, and the radon isotope has a much shorter half-life (about a minute compared to about 4 days). Sam is absolutely right that one of the biggest advantages of mining Thorium is you simply don’t have to do it as much since it is more fuel dense. Also, mining Thorium and Uranium is far safer than mining coal, simply because you don’t have to do it nearly as much, as you need 20,000 kg of coal for 1 kg of uranium (and even more coal for 1 kg of thorium with plutonium)
I think you are wrong about the passive safety segment, outside of reactors when working on enrichment or when the reactors fail uranium can and will go critical, in reactors we saw this at Fukushima and in enrichment there was the loss of Hisashi Ouchi, and a few other examples throughout the world
I suspect the reason Sam mentioned the runaway reaction is that 1) that is what most people DO worry about when it comes to nuclear power, thanks to Chernobyl and 3MI and 2) he's also talking about a situation where absolutely everything goes wrong and containment is breached, like Fukushima.
Really, Fukushima wasn't everything going wrong. It's sister to the south survived the same earthquake and tsunami just fine. There were only two problems at Fukushima. First, the sea wall wasn't high enough. And the government knew it and had told the company to fix that. Why they let the company just . . . not fix it I don't know. But even that wouldn't have been a problem had Fukushima's backup generators not been stored in the freaking basement. Another problem the government pointed out beforehand that the company never got around to fixing.
Yeah a lot of the fail-safes he talked about we're relying on having some form of power and in cases like Fukushima were company greed over Road Safety you have people deciding that a reactor that needs to be safeguarded against Earthquakes and tsunamis putting their backup generators underground in a basement
@@bolbyballingerI see the point that you’re making… but at the same time, I don’t think it’s important in the bigger picture. Sure, it’s plenty safe if the proper precautions are taken, and this is a case where they weren’t. But if anything, I think that goes against your point; the proper precautions aren’t being taken, and the systems that try to ensure that failed.
the problem is these aren't even that dangerous, the entire nuclear discourse is now apology for something you will never have control over but that can never reach the level of killings and damage done by every other energy industry 😊 it's starting to become a tedium, every time you say nuclear WHATABOUT CHORNOBYL seriously man Imagine if every time you spoke English someone said in a different language "didn't you know English was used by slavers when they conquered Africa???" or something like that (although it was more the Dutch). The level of vindictiveness here is unreal. Someone needs to start calling this out.
Or wind or solar because of the absurd volume and unethical mining that has to take place to get to replacement levels. The future is really nuclear and hydro, which pair up really well because hydro doubles as an energy storage solution (highest utilized energy storage solution in the world currently, and no reason to not do more in the future).
Then you get people that protest about “Stop nuclear now, it’s destroying our planet!”, despite not knowing other then what a Facebook page said. They think there is going to be another Chernobyl or Fukushima. Also pretty much all nuclear waste is easily manageable, it’s just the expended fuel rods and things in very close contact to the fuel that are problematic.
@@JasonMitchellofcompsci yeah, where I live almost all of our power comes from hydro and as a result we have some of the cheapest electricity in North America
While not really related to the subject of nuclear energy, I would love to see more reactions to Sam O'Nella's videos, they're reasonably short, and quite entertaining to react to :)
8:20 it was reference to rare accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima when safety is either turned off or damaged and even if you manage to turn it on it's too late. Very unlikely, especially today on modern reactors, but real scenario.
Also this is the problem that most people are afraid of so if it's not possible or made a lot less likely then people will be more interested in investing
@@DrekromancerIt also extremely risky and pretty much more expensive than just building an oil rig. So many government or private company were extremely reluctant to invest in it (It need *years* for it to finally starts making money). Also many Nuclear reactor incidents were pretty much human error or something that are outside of their control. Chernobyl were cutting corners and the companies tried to downplay it down while Fukushima were getting hit by a fucking tsunami.
One other advantage of Thorium that no one mentions is that it is named after Thor, the god of Might and Thunder. While Uranium is named after Uranus god of the sky and buttholes.
i think that you are one of the few actually good reactors, you give your input in very good detail and you also laugh at jokes, wich is something that surprisingly few people can do at the same time
I'm team "whatever the hell gets us off fossil fuels." A comprehensive approach can offer niche solutions for niche problems where one type of power generation wouldn't work, but another would.
I'm on team let's think about it and have the people thinking about it not paid by energy companies. Also wind energy is worse that fossil fuels. It still degrades environments and it can barely net more energy than the energy it costs to produce. Might as well never use it
@@testingmysoup5678 that's just straight-up misinformation. The vast majority of wind turbines pay back their energy cost within a few months to about 2 years at most. Only if you were to place the turbines in really bad spots you'd have trouble generating enough energy to "pay back" its production cost (in energy) - but no one places them in those bad spots anyway. I'll assume you just didn't know that, so if you want to read some actual studies on the subject I recommend "Comparative life cycle assessment of 2.0 MW wind turbines" by Karl R. Haapala and Preedanood Prempreeda (2014) or "Meta-analysis of net energy return for wind power systems" by Ida Kubiszewski, Cutler J. Cleveland and Peter K. Endres (2010)
@@mister_kaniela wow what's better thinking something through or just acting without thinking. The issue with green evergy is it's not thought through, it's just made for profit. Wind sucks, solar sucks, electric cars suck. They're just ideas to give rich people taxpayer money and nothing else.
Thorium salt reactors produce extremely gamma active waste, it's why the only two countries to use them are China and India, countries where waste regulation isn't a thing.
China has really good environmental protections which is why their only thorium reactor is in the middle of the desert and is only for testing purposes atm. I was under the impression that the plutonium required for thorium reactors was why the waste is so bad, is that the source of gamma active waste? @@Nothing_._Here
Thats just wrong. While it does produce gamma active waste, which can be later used to create nuclear weapons. China and India are not the only ones running it. Norway operates one as well, and many countries are actively researching thorium reactors, including the United States. @@Nothing_._Here
@@prypiatshadow6371 No one is making nuclear weapons out of radium. The reactor in Norway is a demonstrative study reactor, it produces an insignificant portion of Norway's electricity. The discussion has never been about nuclear weapons, it's about the extremely powerful gamma emitting waste. It is not cheap to handle it nor is it cheap to store it.
@@Nothing_._Here thorium fission reaction doesn't directly decay to radium. thorium fission reaction makes uranium-232 and 233, which is definitely usable for nuclear weapon
Ohh Sam Onella. A good choice, you can get a lot of viewers with him, because he's fucking amazing on it's own but with your knowledge and input, it's awesome squared. Also, this comment is purely made for the algoryhthm, you deserve more views c:
Something that is important to note is that Plutonium is not the only "helper" usable to do a Thorium reaction chain. U-233 can also be used, for example, as is in a new reactor design I have been working on with a research group at my chosen university to start a U-233 decay chain. Disregarding inaccuracies due to the simplification of the safeties listed in this video, these safeties are, of course, not the only safeties Thorium provides, as Plutonium is absent from the Th-232 OR U-233 decay chain. By using a "helper" other than Plutonium to start a reaction (at least in the case of molten salt reactors, which is what I currently know the most about), you can skip any nuclear fuel reprocessing needed to get that "helper" Plutonium, eliminating Plutonium from all sides of the equation, and thus making new reactors *theoretically* faster to build as the NRC won't be nearly as restrictive when it comes to reactor certification. Additionally, fuel reprocessing from the U-233 chain mentioned can yield really interesting stuff, namely Moly 99 and Bismuth-213...
But shouldn't U233 be as heavily regulated as Pu239, though? If I understand correctly, Pu239 is a problem because it can be used for a bomb, while U233... Can be used for a bomb, with at least 90% energy of Pu239 payload of the same mass.
@@Xnoob545 public information on that is fairly limited, like there was one in each of tests of "Operation Teapot" and "Pokhran II"; best we have is "LRL interest in U-233" report that contains claims from LRL (one of main US nuclear weapon labs, LNLL today) that U233 is "highly satisfactory as a weapons material", and if it was used for bombs in the first place, "LRL would have no interest in switching to plutonium".
@@Norzel7 I think the point was that there are other materials that can be used that are either safer or much harder to weaponize then Plutonium is. I know little to nothing about the specifics of it myself though.
one of the few reaction channels that could probably make a compelling argument for transformative content, bypassing copyright simply because of how much extra information you pack into these. I like ur style :)
Are you insane!?. Do you know how long it takes to make a video? Sure he's better than Hassan, XQC and Jinx. But wtf did content theft just become ok because of that?
I am really liking the extra level of context, information and detail you give in your videos about videos and concepts already spread on the mainstream consciousness Really good work
11:50 It should be specified that this does not mean the reactor has any chance of spontaneously *becoming* a nuclear weapon. It simply means that the availability of plutonium in general allows relatively easy construction of weapons compared to other elements. Now this will be obvious to a lot of people, but what should also be obvious is that not everyone has the same education/knowledge.
I always assumed what Sam was getting at is that because you only need a little bit of Plutonium, you can keep track of it easily because there's relatively very little of it. It would be very hard to get away with shaving a bit off for nuclear weaponry when that little bit is like 12% of the whole. (Not an actual statistic.)
This video had me grinning most of the time at both the original video displayed, and your reaction to it. That must have been one of the most hilarious descriptions of how Thorium vs Uranium works I've ever seen. Would like to see something similar, but then when describing the various reactor types😁
I think Sam's take on the safety is kinda about what happened in Chernobyl. There the usually effective failsafe of control rods didn't stop the reactor from blowing up and then just keeping up reacting and being a radioactive nuisance. Basically if Chernobyl was a thorium reactor, all of that horrendous aftermath wouldn't have happened
In theory yeah, though chernobyl had every possible corner cut where the reactor could still "function" too. So who knows, they might've figured out how to make thorium do just as bad 😂
@@Coastal_Cruzer maybe using thorium pellets with completely embedded plutonium cores, and a reactor design where everything would just melt into a big, radioactive mess, and then storing it above a few hundred tons of tnt, soaked in nitroglycerin and covered in a dusting of gunpowder? I'm not a nuclear engineer, but to my amateur eyes it looks like the xenon poisoning that made the Chernobyl engineers pull all the control rods wouldn't really have an equivalent, and they would have to invent an entirely novel way to have the reactor explode. It's always possible to get the steam-power part of the reactor to explode, but the result would be scalding steam, and not a nuclear conflageration. Apparently, you'd have to go out of your way to a degree far beyond the Soviet corner cutting to get the fun type of explosion.
lots of good information! also, i appreciate channels like O'Nella and you endorsing nuclear options, since they've been so heavily demonized, especially to my generation (they've really stuck since i do not live far from the original Chernobyl fallout zone). edit: i do actually live within the fallout zone (eastern Finland), of course it is safe now, but our parents and teachers very much were freaked out by it and passed it on.
Honestly this just makes me think of my favourite description of nuclear power, from a JFJ video. "A nuclear reactor is a steam generator, heat makes steam, the steam makes electricity. When you look at chernobyl you shouldn't think "nuclear power dangerous", you should instead think "wow, the slavs were so stupid they couldn't even boil water properly."
Yeah. The USSR was ridiculously corner cutting in basically everything technology related they did, from vehicles to infastructure. They just made the corpses that resulted from this disappear so they'd avoid the bad press. The reason that Chernobyl and Fukashima happened was safety standards being violated. This isn't a danger unique to nuclear power. Oil, chemical, and other refineries have a much worse track record for them having destructive disasters. It's just that the media can't whip the public into a frenzy using fearmongering with those because the public has some semblance of a grasp of how they work compared to the general ignorance about nuclear sources and radiation and the fear surrounding nukes.
What’s your Noble they intentional? He disabled all safety protocol so that they could force test the theory radical disaster. Scituate should watch it. It’s so real Stickley unfold it as a real disaster, which is basically the technology equipment. I’m trying to side, if putting your hand on a hot streak, stupid hurt, not by testing out a proxy with chicken breast, but shopping, but by shpvkng your fucking hand on it. Anyway, remind me what happened the last time Russian and German technology went head-to-head. Some thing about Russian tanks rampaging through Berlin.
As someone who spent 600 hours of active work and probably the same time as passive thinking on the subject of thorium vs uranium for a school project. I can say that he is mostly true, but a few minute video is not enough to explain the subject in enough detail. The 15 minute PowerPoint I was meant to make expanded, until I needed to ask our professor permission to spend an entire lesson (90 minutes) on the subject. I personally went over 6 different topics in the matter: 1. How they are used in power production 2. A few points in security 3. The costs 4. How abundent they are as a resource in Finland 5. Mining and enrichment 6. Their current situation in the world Ending with: As much as it would be incredible, had we put resources into thorium development 20 years ago, we did not. Therefore thorium isn't the energy source of today. But if we were to delve into it now, it could be the energy source of tomorrow. Sam's original video was a great inspiration for me to start studying nuclear myself.
@@Udontlikeice I would need to make a lot of changes for me to feel comfortable about posting it on TH-cam. I'm kind of a perfectionist, and the PowerPoint was tailored for my not as bright classmates, which means that it's not fit for the audience I would want to capture here on TH-cam. I would also need to add some extra information about the enrichment of both elements, since I simplified them too much. What I'm trying to say with this reply, is that it would take quite a bit of effort for not that much reward to post it on TH-cam.
When it comes to the passive safety poriton of the video, I think Sam may have gotten caught up on just how cheaper and cleaner Thorium's safety protocols are and some of the details got lost in translation to the mspaint slide show.
7:00 what he's trying to say is- yes you can insert control rods and it'll shut down...... but in an *everything hits the fans* situation, where it all goes wrong, nothing works..... those rods don't drop and uranium just keeps hyping itself up into overload but Thorium can't without a kick start... so it's a lot easier to just remove the plutonium boost and it'll die off on it's own
Would it? Its a breeder reactor, meaning thorium will eventuoly become uranium and will start transforming other thorium to uranium. The thing which im not sure is if there is a time apam where you kept breeding it enought that you can remove uranium/plutonium and reaction will still keep going.
I would like to see a combination power plant using uranium to boost thorium. Alternatively I’ve heard some interesting conceptual designs using thorium synergistically with fusion reactors.
I was wondering whether you could cover a topic of natural nuclear reactors? I'm really curious whether history of energy production would change, if we would discovered this phenomenon much earlier? Much appreciated
I'm slightly cynical and think nuance is lost on the average voter, therefore I think that thorium is mostly a politically safer nuclear power source. In places where the average citizen already got his mind made up, it would be political suicide to bring nuclear energy up again, for example in Germany... unless you've got a good pitch with all these slightly flawed safety arguments Sam also used here.
Uranium mines are known to be significant sources of radon gas due to the presence of uranium ore. When uranium in the ore decays, it produces radon gas as one of its decay products.
Hey man, it didn't take me long to look up that radon is a direct decay product of uranium ore. I live in the Appalachias (they're lousy with uranium and every 15 years theres an energy bill deliberating on opening the mountains up for mining) and have grown up hearing about the dangers of radon. If I'm wrong then I'd be interested to hear what I'm getting wrong and corrected
Thanks for your comment! Yes, Uranium does eventually decay into Radon. However, there are multiple intermediate steps, some of which last millions or even billions of years. Uranium decays into Thorium first, then there are other steps, depending on the isotope. Radium is what decays directly into Radon. Thorium is actually closer to Radon than Uranium I could have explained this better and I apologize for any confusion, I just didn't have the decay chains memorized when I made this video 😅
@@tfolsenuclear You can't just gloss over the different isotopes like that. Thorium occurs almost 100% as Th232. This produces, along its decay chain, only radon Rn220 with a half-life of 55 seconds. Thus thorium ore with low uranium content will not tend to accumulate radon gas. In contrast, U238 produces Rn222 with a half-life of almost four days, so it can accumulate to dangerous levels. The intermediate steps don't matter in the way that you suggest. Except for the radon, all that stuff is solid and thus stays with the original ore. It is always present in well-defined ratios depending on the age of the ore (since it was last molten).
@@tfolsenuclear Uranium 238 does not decay in to Thorium 232, which makes up 99.98% of all Thorium. Thorium 232 only decays in to an isotope of radon with a half life of about 56 seconds. The Radon that is an intermediate state of the decay chain of Uranium 238 down to stable Lead 206 has a half -life of about 3.8 days. It is this radon 224 that is the issue, not the Radon 224.
at 8:30 here is the thing common people still talk about Chernobyl and Fukushima, that's their introduction to the bad cases of nuclear they dont have the know how to know about other worries. so him bringing that up is targeted at those cases and also for the common person with little to no know how on how these work, because that is what they worry about. not to mention that after all these years thorium is new has not had any problems caused with it yet, but uranium has had multiple problems happen that have had far reaching effects so it would be a lot easier to bring common people over to this then for something new with uranium.
I'm pretty sure one of the decay products in the U 238 chain is radon gas. It's a big problem where I am because we have a lot of uranium and the gas gets caught in basements.
Hmm, well in an ideal capitalistic society you'd naturally want to promote an energy environment that used both efficiently. If Thorium is 3 times more plentiful and requires less effort to enrich the primary material then with that alone I'd expect 3 - 5 times the number of reactors created that use a Thorium based fuel system compared to Uranium. I don't see the plutonium/Uranium reaction starter as a drawback but rather a potentially more efficient use of rarer resources. I also don't think that Thorium Nuclear reactors would just replace Uranium reactors all over the world or anything drastic like that, but I could see some Uranium reactors being used as partial production/enriching sites for the reaction starting material for Thorium reactors that might be nearby. I also think a few reactors may eventually be converted to use both becoming a 3 phase Thorium reactor, going from Uranium 235 > Uranium 238 > Plutonium 239 > Thorium 232 > Uranium 233 and then just going from Uranium 233 > Thorium 232 > Uranium 233 Recycling to start the process over and keep it resource cheap/efficient.
10:08 I think he's referring to a two fluid molten salt breeder reactor without realizing it, in which case the thorium is entirely consumed as it's converted into u235 through a neutron exposure then decay process. This ups yoyr efficiency, or at least burn through rate, to insanely high levels, meaning you need far less thorium than even processed uranium The issue is making a two fluid breeder reactor which is uh, hard
I thought the product was U-233 from Th-232. Thorium-232 plus a neutron becomes Thorium-233, which beta decays into Proactinium-233, which then beta decays into Uranium-233.
I think that the amount of uranium vs thorium in the crust is one of the biggest pros for thorium. Namely, in price just because of supply and demand. Most of the thorium mined today is seen as a byproduct or overburden and plenty is available right now, we just need to process it.
My biggest issue with nuclear power is quite simply that I don't know if I can trust the government or big businesses or whoever may own one of these things to be competent enough to handle it efficiently. Look at Fukushima, that wasn't a massive issue because the safety measures failed, that was a massive issue because the Japanese government was too incompetent to do anything about the failing safety measures in a timely manner.
Not even in a timely manner, they had a whole TWENTY YEARS of warnings and still did nothing for what was, in my opinion, a glaring issue. Who the hell puts the backup generators at sea level in a nuclear power plant on the coast directly in the line with one of the largest active subduction faults. Honest to god baffling, walls or no walls you add redundancy!
We don't need to exclusively use Thorium. However, *not* using Thorium would be pretty wasteful, and especially not using Thorium because were using fossil fuels instead would be... Well, my ma always told me what i should do if I can't say something nice....
I've heard that thorium takes a very long time to ramp up power production, like on the scale of weeks. that sounds like you have way more time to react if everything goes wrong. but i guess that means it will not be practical to have a power grid where the thorium reactors produce more power than the minimum ever needed by the grid. I suspect thorium will become more common in the near future, as it has a clean record in the public eye, unlike uranium. it's irrational, but public discourse tends to avoid complexities
The way the power market works, you'll have people with inflexible reactors offering a certain, low amount of money for the power they produce. Since it's not economical to reduce production, they benefit form selling all the power. Higher power demand means the people selling more expensive power will also produce, and the price rises to match the most expensive power being sold to cover the demand. More flexible reactors will command a higher price, since they can increase production for high demand, but don't really need to worry about the cost of reducing production, factoring in mostly opportunity cost. Hydroelectric power can deliver loads of power completely on demand, and can be used to cover any spontaneous peaks. They can stop producing power entirely if the demand doesn't go above the baseline formed by the inflexible reactors, that have to keep temperatures up no matter what. Thorium would form a very stable, very cheap but highly inflexible backbone to the power supply, and hydro power or similar would take the peaks. How much power would be produced in thorium reactors would be entirely dependent on market powers, which again depend on the infrastructure and ease of transferring electrical power. It would never be economical to cover the entire demand with thorium unless it literally only took one reactor, however. If you knew that all the power plants had to keep producing more power than you could ever use, regardless of payment, simply to keep their reaction alive, you'd bid less and less money until producers started going out of business and you reached a new equilibrium in the power market.
I would recommend the channel "Blue Jay" and his videos about radiation, for example the video "The Worst Radioactive Ideas in Nuclear History" or "Radiation in a Nutshell" would fit his expertise. ^^'
Well if you think about it all of our methods of making electricity (at least what comes to my mind) are simply converting mechanical energy into electricity. In most cases this mechanical energy is converted from thermal energy (car engines, coal power plants, nuclear power plants, ect.) using water, i.e. going from thermal energy->chemical energy-> mechanical energy -> electricity happens to be extremely efficient and something we got right the first time. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Of course converting through all those types of energy means some is lost due to entropy. It’ll be interesting to see if maybe we can come up with ways in the future to directly turn thermal energy in electricity.
I’m team nuclear all the way, I believe it belongs in use. Rteg’s have as much purpose for use in the aerospace industry as candu reactors do in civilian electricity generation, I would love to see a fully functional fusion reactor but that’s going to take some time. Helion is thankfully using a reverse field configuration confinement method, my only complaint about their design is that they are only extracting energy through the change in magnetic flux density and not also including energy extraction via the cooling system. I would hazard a wager that using multiple energy extraction methods will lead to better efficiency, then again, I don’t exactly have a degree in nuclear engineering. I’ve been interested in the subject and teaching myself plenty on a regular basis for over 6 years, auditing classes and courses since I can’t exactly afford that degree. I’ve also been desperate for hands on experience, but that’s not in the cards currently. Your content is excellent as far as I can tell, but this is the very first video of yours I’ve ever watched. Keep up the excellent work you chad.
Thing about nuclear reactions is that they are controlled until they are not, which is why the thorium safety was pointed out. When it's suddenly and unexpectedly becomes "not great, not terrible" you can do something to stop it pretty quickly and not take 100+ years of cleanup. Not to mention it's more about public perception
The whole video I was thinking. Sam's whole thing at the start was about the abundance of Thorium vs Uranium. Then he introduced Plutonium. The purpose he stated about the Plutonium was the miniscule waste product. However you stated that much less Plutonium would be needed to weaponize compared to the drawn out Uranium path to weaponization. So My thoughts would trend towards using Uranium as the key to Thoriums starter. That would allow the relatively small pockets of Uranium to be stretched further as we would use less of it. Also you are using such a small amount when paired with Thorium that it isn't producing a ton of waste anyway.
my guy, if you're reacting to a video talking about a subject dont stop right when the a topic is introduced to explain what the video is clearly just about to explain. I get doing it a couple of times as a force of habit but like, everytime?
Your knowledge of where radon comes from might need some brushing up, here's an excerpt from Wikipedia's radon page "It occurs naturally in minute quantities as an intermediate step in the normal radioactive decay chains through which thorium and uranium slowly decay into various short-lived radioactive elements".
13:49 With my government (Germany) I would stop the fear-mongering against nuclear power and reverse the terribly stupid decision to shut down all nuclear power plants... Especially in times where we all want to use renewable energy, having a steady and reliable source of energy is extremely important, as hydro, wind, solar, etc. are all inherently unreliable (output wise).
I think tandum Uranium/Thorium plants are the ideal future. If I recall correctly, Thorium needs around 30 days to breed into usable fuel. That's a large lag time of both, not producing power after a shutdown and requiring a non-self-sustaining neutron source. Having a Uranium reactor to do both on site while that lag time occurs is probably the best option.
He is saying that if a disaster happened and no one could interact with the reactor to shut it of (like what happened in Chernobyl and Fukashima), it would still turn off by itself due to how it was designed in the reactor designs he is talking about.
Breeder reactors are the future of all energy! Im currently studying electrical engineering to eventually specialize in power engineering, and out of all sources, nuclear has always been my favorite. I want advice on if and how I could secure my position as an engineer in a nuclear plant some day. And all my love towards nuclear originates from this Sam O'nella video to a point in which I was debating the title of nuclear "waste" as waste due to a majority of what we're dumping is fertile Uranium 238 that could be turned into an energy dense fissile Plutonium 239 with the actual waste products of fission being very miniscule with low half lives hovering around 30 years compared to 4.5 billion with U 238 and 20k with Plutonium (which acts as denser nuclear fuel by itself)
You sort of gloss over it here, but the big thing with uranium is the ability to use the fast reactor. they are far more effective than conventional ones, but due to regulation they are banned because of fear of proliferation. If that were not the case, uranium would be a far more effective fuel source than thorium, in my opinion, but since it is not, thorium due to its volume on Earth is the obvious choice.
It'd be cool if you played with the Minecraft Big reactors mod and see what the mod makers got right and what they got wrong and how they could improve it.
Gotta love a guy who trys to provide his knowlage to people who have shown some interest, and is open to corrections in the comments. TH-cam needs more of people like this. Thanks for the video, hope you never need your SCRAM!
3:21: Well Radon is a decay product of Uranium, so it is linked to sides where you would mine that. But it's also in the decay chain of thorium, so I don't know how that is supposed to be different.
Thorium 232 produces radon 220 with a half-life of 55 seconds. Uranium 238 produces radon 222 with a half-life of almost four days. This means that the uranium-produced radon can travel further distances from the actual ore trough the cracks in the rock, and accumulate more. The rates of production are probably also different, but that would require you to do equilibrium calculations based on all the half-life's of the intermediate isotopes; and you need to know the ore concentrations.
7:40 I think what Sam was getting at here is that enriched uranium 235 can go critical on it's own, and if it's not already in some kind of safety system, it can go out of control, whereas since thorium needs a little kick, it's safer to handle up to the point that it's in the reactor.
Yes, some of it does! Though, it is pretty far down the decay chain - radon comes directly from radium. Thorium is actually closer to radon since uranium decays into thorium.
I think Sam was thinking more about earlier reactors, where fuel/controls could get dostorted and bent and stuck. It did USED to be a problem. And it seemed like elhaving enough coolant in such an emergency was, idk, forgotten? Deemed impossible due to arrogance? Again, yes. Today, nbd. Its just like how EVERY CAR used to have metal dashboards and solid steering columns (ie not collapsable). My dad, as a doc, always talks ab9ut having to "unwrap people" from steering wheels. That and how SafetyGlass was a miracle. Plastic surgery has roots in windshield UNsafety glass. Like a blender atacked rhe face. Thats where it staryed, along with fixing cleft palates. So people could just be people and.not be gawked at amd ridiculed. Plastic surgery NOW... Not quite so noble and wholesome, in some cases. But who i am to judge?
I’m very much Team Thorium/Uranium, but also Team Fusion. Fusion is the holy grail, and we desperately need to develop it into a useable energy source. That’s one of my goals in college, to become a physicist and work in fusion. What are your thoughts on fusion, if I may ask?
I don't know the decay chains but google tells me radon decays from radium and uranium. I also don't know what materials are normally found together. I do remember some talks having trouble mining rare earths because of thorium content and related disposal.
BRING ON THE NUCLEAR BABYYYYY IM TALKING SOLAR GEOTHERMAL AND REACTORS BABYYYYY I’m the weirdo cuz even with the supposed danger I’m comparing it to the long term damage we’ve already done and seeing it as a an acceptable risk. Considering most of my concerns have been addressed, I don’t get why we still don’t have more
My guess is the reason thorium will end up being the more popular option is because of how much more efficient the mining process is and the availability of the material.
Good to get some clarification, i love Salmonella. I think the safety thing might be from info thats older or atleast i was under the impression that older power plants have had control rod protections and redudencies fail. Let me know if im thinking about it different and i know modern reactors are generally made safer than older plants like 50 years ago.
Thorium would be great for countries like India simply because they have _so much of it._ Honestly though, I'd be curious to know how many times uranium waste can be reprocessed until you break even with the energy you get out of it.
I like the fact that Thorium takes little effort to refine it for use in generating power. Plus the abundance of it ..and the ease of mining it. Reactor meltdowns like 3 Mile Island, cherynoble and Fukishiama were (if i recall correctly) poorly (and cheaply) designed reactors. Design and building of a nuclear reactor is something that we should never cheap out on
From Not a nuclear engineer, but a nuclear physicist: Radon is a daughter of Uranium. i.e. in the decay chain og uranium, so it is procuded by uranium, and always found in uranium depostist. Sam O Nella Academy vs T Folse Nuclear: 1 - 0
7:57 Correcting a nuclear engineer is dangerous business, especially if you're a random layman, but here goes: Don't you mean "negative void coefficient" when you say "negative reactivity coefficient"?
Hahaha! Please feel free to challenge my statements! A negative void coefficient is a type of negative reactivity coefficient! The one I talked about in this video was a negative temperature coefficient. Negative void coefficient = increase amount of steam in reactor vessel, power goes down. Negative temperature coefficient = increase temperature of reactor coolant, power goes down. Negative reactivity coefficient = increase in , power goes down. Hope that helps!
I think he meant that Radon 222 is part of the decay series of Uranium 235, and can be expected to accumulate to higher concentrations in Uranium mines. His point isn’t completely valid since Thorium 232 also has an isotope of Radon in its decay series, albeit a shorter lived one.
I was promised a Thorium reactor car about 20 years ago or so. Still waiting on that. I always wondered how they would incorporate reactor shielding into my sedan's design. Pro: never needing gas... ever. Con: driving around with basically a flux capacitor (assuming my tiny Thorium reactor would need a tiny Plutonium pellet helper to maintain fission reactivity.)
A bit of warning, Sam O'Nella reacted very negatively to reaction videos of his stuff. I'd recommend against reacting to his videos as you might end up with strikes on your channel. It happened to Vlogging Through History... Edit: Sorry, my mistake, that was CGP Grey that reacted negatively to reaction videos.
I think you might be a little too close to the problem to really see what people actually talk about. Certainly, people who are in the field who know what they're doing aren't as concerned with runaway reactors. The general population, however, is VERY concerned with runaway reactors. It is instilled in a lot of us that nuclear is bad, and every nuclear reactor is a nuclear bomb we put on our beaches, waiting to detonate and send us into some nuclear zombie apocalypse, all because of stuff like 3 mile island and chernobyl, as well as general media sensationalism. That's where Thorium's passive safety comes in. If literally everything goes wrong, you can still stop Thorium from exploding with little more than some basic engineering. If literally everything goes wrong with uranium, all you can do is evacuate the area, because it's just going to go until it blows up. Yes, safety measures are far better now, and the chance of that happening is unlikely. However, if Fukushima taught us anything, it's that standards will be ignored, and safety precautions will be caught in the interest of minor convenience or saving money.
3:10 I was quite wrong about this. Thanks so much for pointing this out in the comments! I appreciate you keeping my facts straight!
Uranium does eventually decay into Radon. So does Thorium, but in much lower quantities, and the radon isotope has a much shorter half-life (about a minute compared to about 4 days).
Sam is absolutely right that one of the biggest advantages of mining Thorium is you simply don’t have to do it as much since it is more fuel dense.
Also, mining Thorium and Uranium is far safer than mining coal, simply because you don’t have to do it nearly as much, as you need 20,000 kg of coal for 1 kg of uranium (and even more coal for 1 kg of thorium with plutonium)
W for correcting yourself from a 2 week old video. Awesome dude
^ Indeed, subbed right after reading it
This would be good for schools to be teaching during earth science classes, especially since Science gets more refined
but how much dirt and rock you have to dig to get 1kg of uranium? coal should be easier mining and processing-wise right?
I think you are wrong about the passive safety segment, outside of reactors when working on enrichment or when the reactors fail uranium can and will go critical, in reactors we saw this at Fukushima and in enrichment there was the loss of Hisashi Ouchi, and a few other examples throughout the world
I suspect the reason Sam mentioned the runaway reaction is that 1) that is what most people DO worry about when it comes to nuclear power, thanks to Chernobyl and 3MI and 2) he's also talking about a situation where absolutely everything goes wrong and containment is breached, like Fukushima.
Yeah in quite annoyed that went over his head.
Really, Fukushima wasn't everything going wrong.
It's sister to the south survived the same earthquake and tsunami just fine.
There were only two problems at Fukushima. First, the sea wall wasn't high enough. And the government knew it and had told the company to fix that.
Why they let the company just . . . not fix it I don't know.
But even that wouldn't have been a problem had Fukushima's backup generators not been stored in the freaking basement. Another problem the government pointed out beforehand that the company never got around to fixing.
Yeah a lot of the fail-safes he talked about we're relying on having some form of power and in cases like Fukushima were company greed over Road Safety you have people deciding that a reactor that needs to be safeguarded against Earthquakes and tsunamis putting their backup generators underground in a basement
@@bolbyballingerI see the point that you’re making… but at the same time, I don’t think it’s important in the bigger picture.
Sure, it’s plenty safe if the proper precautions are taken, and this is a case where they weren’t. But if anything, I think that goes against your point; the proper precautions aren’t being taken, and the systems that try to ensure that failed.
the problem is these aren't even that dangerous, the entire nuclear discourse is now apology for something you will never have control over but that can never reach the level of killings and damage done by every other energy industry 😊 it's starting to become a tedium, every time you say nuclear WHATABOUT CHORNOBYL seriously man
Imagine if every time you spoke English someone said in a different language "didn't you know English was used by slavers when they conquered Africa???" or something like that (although it was more the Dutch). The level of vindictiveness here is unreal. Someone needs to start calling this out.
The future is doing whatever the hell we can that isnt coal or oil
Or wind or solar because of the absurd volume and unethical mining that has to take place to get to replacement levels.
The future is really nuclear and hydro, which pair up really well because hydro doubles as an energy storage solution (highest utilized energy storage solution in the world currently, and no reason to not do more in the future).
Then you get people that protest about “Stop nuclear now, it’s destroying our planet!”, despite not knowing other then what a Facebook page said. They think there is going to be another Chernobyl or Fukushima. Also pretty much all nuclear waste is easily manageable, it’s just the expended fuel rods and things in very close contact to the fuel that are problematic.
@@JasonMitchellofcompsci yeah, where I live almost all of our power comes from hydro and as a result we have some of the cheapest electricity in North America
Live forever, travel the stars STOP WARS AND SLAVERY
Agree!
While not really related to the subject of nuclear energy, I would love to see more reactions to Sam O'Nella's videos, they're reasonably short, and quite entertaining to react to :)
We really do miss Sam O'nella contents aren't we
@@y__h he just released a new vid today
@@nim4464yuuuuup
@@nim4464 did he?
@@AveriV1 yeah he did
8:20 it was reference to rare accidents like Chernobyl or Fukushima when safety is either turned off or damaged and even if you manage to turn it on it's too late. Very unlikely, especially today on modern reactors, but real scenario.
Fukushima was a freak accident involving a tidal wave, what the f-
modern is a strech considering how everyone is too scared to invest in the thing
@@Bigzthegreat Honestly, good take. At that point, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Also this is the problem that most people are afraid of so if it's not possible or made a lot less likely then people will be more interested in investing
@@DrekromancerIt also extremely risky and pretty much more expensive than just building an oil rig.
So many government or private company were extremely reluctant to invest in it (It need *years* for it to finally starts making money).
Also many Nuclear reactor incidents were pretty much human error or something that are outside of their control.
Chernobyl were cutting corners and the companies tried to downplay it down while Fukushima were getting hit by a fucking tsunami.
One other advantage of Thorium that no one mentions is that it is named after Thor, the god of Might and Thunder. While Uranium is named after Uranus god of the sky and buttholes.
I'd fact-check that last part, but it probably would be less funny.
@arcturus8329 well, not the God of ALL buttholes. Just ur anus.
@@arcturus8329most of greek myths are a thing is mostly because zeus cant keep himself from doing the funny
@@arcturus8329I just did. Uranus is definitely the god of buttholes
Considering that the planet Uranus smells like farts (methane clouds), the buttholes part is quite fitting.
i think that you are one of the few actually good reactors, you give your input in very good detail and you also laugh at jokes, wich is something that surprisingly few people can do at the same time
Thanks so much!
heh, reactors
REACTORS
Ngl, the reactor thing was totally an accident
I recommend Vlogging Through History if you're interested, he dives deep in each vid and does a reaction to Oversimplified as well
I'm team "whatever the hell gets us off fossil fuels." A comprehensive approach can offer niche solutions for niche problems where one type of power generation wouldn't work, but another would.
I'm on team let's think about it and have the people thinking about it not paid by energy companies. Also wind energy is worse that fossil fuels. It still degrades environments and it can barely net more energy than the energy it costs to produce. Might as well never use it
@@testingmysoup5678 hell yeah team "lets sit around and think some more and by no means act on anything"
@@testingmysoup5678 that's just straight-up misinformation.
The vast majority of wind turbines pay back their energy cost within a few months to about 2 years at most.
Only if you were to place the turbines in really bad spots you'd have trouble generating enough energy to "pay back" its production cost (in energy) - but no one places them in those bad spots anyway.
I'll assume you just didn't know that, so if you want to read some actual studies on the subject I recommend "Comparative life cycle assessment of 2.0 MW wind turbines" by Karl R. Haapala and Preedanood Prempreeda (2014) or "Meta-analysis of net energy return for wind power systems" by Ida Kubiszewski, Cutler J. Cleveland and Peter K. Endres (2010)
@@mister_kaniela wow what's better thinking something through or just acting without thinking. The issue with green evergy is it's not thought through, it's just made for profit. Wind sucks, solar sucks, electric cars suck. They're just ideas to give rich people taxpayer money and nothing else.
Fusion and nuclear are good bets.
Currently going thru Nuclear Power School and I gotta say I’m pleasantly surprised at how much he and you both actually managed to explain so simply
Thanks, good luck!
Ha nuke
Bruh
Rickover is love, Rick over is life.
I graduated nuc school Orlando in 1985. I too like the simplification. It's a good place to get the normies to ask questions
Personally, I'm for thorium, but I would certainly just like to see cleaner plants in general, so uranium isn't bad
Thorium salt reactors produce extremely gamma active waste, it's why the only two countries to use them are China and India, countries where waste regulation isn't a thing.
China has really good environmental protections which is why their only thorium reactor is in the middle of the desert and is only for testing purposes atm. I was under the impression that the plutonium required for thorium reactors was why the waste is so bad, is that the source of gamma active waste? @@Nothing_._Here
Thats just wrong. While it does produce gamma active waste, which can be later used to create nuclear weapons. China and India are not the only ones running it. Norway operates one as well, and many countries are actively researching thorium reactors, including the United States. @@Nothing_._Here
@@prypiatshadow6371 No one is making nuclear weapons out of radium. The reactor in Norway is a demonstrative study reactor, it produces an insignificant portion of Norway's electricity. The discussion has never been about nuclear weapons, it's about the extremely powerful gamma emitting waste. It is not cheap to handle it nor is it cheap to store it.
@@Nothing_._Here thorium fission reaction doesn't directly decay to radium. thorium fission reaction makes uranium-232 and 233, which is definitely usable for nuclear weapon
Ohh Sam Onella. A good choice, you can get a lot of viewers with him, because he's fucking amazing on it's own but with your knowledge and input, it's awesome squared. Also, this comment is purely made for the algoryhthm, you deserve more views c:
Thanks!!
Something that is important to note is that Plutonium is not the only "helper" usable to do a Thorium reaction chain. U-233 can also be used, for example, as is in a new reactor design I have been working on with a research group at my chosen university to start a U-233 decay chain. Disregarding inaccuracies due to the simplification of the safeties listed in this video, these safeties are, of course, not the only safeties Thorium provides, as Plutonium is absent from the Th-232 OR U-233 decay chain. By using a "helper" other than Plutonium to start a reaction (at least in the case of molten salt reactors, which is what I currently know the most about), you can skip any nuclear fuel reprocessing needed to get that "helper" Plutonium, eliminating Plutonium from all sides of the equation, and thus making new reactors *theoretically* faster to build as the NRC won't be nearly as restrictive when it comes to reactor certification. Additionally, fuel reprocessing from the U-233 chain mentioned can yield really interesting stuff, namely Moly 99 and Bismuth-213...
Thanks for your insight and clarification! I really appreciate it!
But shouldn't U233 be as heavily regulated as Pu239, though? If I understand correctly, Pu239 is a problem because it can be used for a bomb, while U233... Can be used for a bomb, with at least 90% energy of Pu239 payload of the same mass.
@@Norzel7 do we have examples of nukes being built with U-233 tho?
@@Xnoob545 public information on that is fairly limited, like there was one in each of tests of "Operation Teapot" and "Pokhran II"; best we have is "LRL interest in U-233" report that contains claims from LRL (one of main US nuclear weapon labs, LNLL today) that U233 is "highly satisfactory as a weapons material", and if it was used for bombs in the first place, "LRL would have no interest in switching to plutonium".
@@Norzel7 I think the point was that there are other materials that can be used that are either safer or much harder to weaponize then Plutonium is. I know little to nothing about the specifics of it myself though.
one of the few reaction channels that could probably make a compelling argument for transformative content, bypassing copyright simply because of how much extra information you pack into these. I like ur style :)
Thank you!
Are you insane!?. Do you know how long it takes to make a video? Sure he's better than Hassan, XQC and Jinx. But wtf did content theft just become ok because of that?
@@felixsahlen1836how is it content theft? this video definitely falls under fair use
@@jmshggrd That's where you are wrong. This doesn't fall under fair use.
@@felixsahlen1836I wouldn't be so sure in this case
I am really liking the extra level of context, information and detail you give in your videos about videos and concepts already spread on the mainstream consciousness
Really good work
Thanks, I greatly appreciate that!
Your cat has a mustache
11:50
It should be specified that this does not mean the reactor has any chance of spontaneously *becoming* a nuclear weapon. It simply means that the availability of plutonium in general allows relatively easy construction of weapons compared to other elements.
Now this will be obvious to a lot of people, but what should also be obvious is that not everyone has the same education/knowledge.
I always assumed what Sam was getting at is that because you only need a little bit of Plutonium, you can keep track of it easily because there's relatively very little of it. It would be very hard to get away with shaving a bit off for nuclear weaponry when that little bit is like 12% of the whole. (Not an actual statistic.)
This video had me grinning most of the time at both the original video displayed, and your reaction to it. That must have been one of the most hilarious descriptions of how Thorium vs Uranium works I've ever seen. Would like to see something similar, but then when describing the various reactor types😁
Glad you enjoyed it! 😁
I think Sam's take on the safety is kinda about what happened in Chernobyl. There the usually effective failsafe of control rods didn't stop the reactor from blowing up and then just keeping up reacting and being a radioactive nuisance. Basically if Chernobyl was a thorium reactor, all of that horrendous aftermath wouldn't have happened
In theory yeah, though chernobyl had every possible corner cut where the reactor could still "function" too. So who knows, they might've figured out how to make thorium do just as bad 😂
@@Coastal_Cruzer maybe using thorium pellets with completely embedded plutonium cores, and a reactor design where everything would just melt into a big, radioactive mess, and then storing it above a few hundred tons of tnt, soaked in nitroglycerin and covered in a dusting of gunpowder? I'm not a nuclear engineer, but to my amateur eyes it looks like the xenon poisoning that made the Chernobyl engineers pull all the control rods wouldn't really have an equivalent, and they would have to invent an entirely novel way to have the reactor explode. It's always possible to get the steam-power part of the reactor to explode, but the result would be scalding steam, and not a nuclear conflageration. Apparently, you'd have to go out of your way to a degree far beyond the Soviet corner cutting to get the fun type of explosion.
@@MrVeps1 what the hell are you on about?
@Coastal_Cruzer
Let him cook, he’s trying to figure out how to cause widespread disaster
It's a theory A GAME THEORY @@RenaissanceWaffle
Who else gets annoyed when the reacter just assumes that the video they are watching doesn't cover something instead of just continuing to watch.
lots of good information! also, i appreciate channels like O'Nella and you endorsing nuclear options, since they've been so heavily demonized, especially to my generation
(they've really stuck since i do not live far from the original Chernobyl fallout zone).
edit: i do actually live within the fallout zone (eastern Finland), of course it is safe now, but our parents and teachers very much were freaked out by it and passed it on.
Thank you very much!
Love the additional info you give in these videos! Thanks! Always love a Sam O Nella video as well.
Glad you liked it!
Honestly this just makes me think of my favourite description of nuclear power, from a JFJ video.
"A nuclear reactor is a steam generator, heat makes steam, the steam makes electricity. When you look at chernobyl you shouldn't think "nuclear power dangerous", you should instead think "wow, the slavs were so stupid they couldn't even boil water properly."
I see a german flag on your pfp, remind me what your country did to all of it's nuclear reactors
Yeah. The USSR was ridiculously corner cutting in basically everything technology related they did, from vehicles to infastructure. They just made the corpses that resulted from this disappear so they'd avoid the bad press.
The reason that Chernobyl and Fukashima happened was safety standards being violated. This isn't a danger unique to nuclear power. Oil, chemical, and other refineries have a much worse track record for them having destructive disasters. It's just that the media can't whip the public into a frenzy using fearmongering with those because the public has some semblance of a grasp of how they work compared to the general ignorance about nuclear sources and radiation and the fear surrounding nukes.
FJF?
@@liarwithagun Oh, media totally can. This is what "global warming" is - fossil fuel fearmongering.
What’s your Noble they intentional? He disabled all safety protocol so that they could force test the theory radical disaster. Scituate should watch it. It’s so real Stickley unfold it as a real disaster, which is basically the technology equipment. I’m trying to side, if putting your hand on a hot streak, stupid hurt, not by testing out a proxy with chicken breast, but shopping, but by shpvkng your fucking hand on it.
Anyway, remind me what happened the last time Russian and German technology went head-to-head. Some thing about Russian tanks rampaging through Berlin.
As someone who spent 600 hours of active work and probably the same time as passive thinking on the subject of thorium vs uranium for a school project. I can say that he is mostly true, but a few minute video is not enough to explain the subject in enough detail. The 15 minute PowerPoint I was meant to make expanded, until I needed to ask our professor permission to spend an entire lesson (90 minutes) on the subject.
I personally went over 6 different topics in the matter:
1. How they are used in power production
2. A few points in security
3. The costs
4. How abundent they are as a resource in Finland
5. Mining and enrichment
6. Their current situation in the world
Ending with: As much as it would be incredible, had we put resources into thorium development 20 years ago, we did not. Therefore thorium isn't the energy source of today. But if we were to delve into it now, it could be the energy source of tomorrow.
Sam's original video was a great inspiration for me to start studying nuclear myself.
Would you ever consider uploading the PowerPoint onto TH-cam?
@@notthatinnocent86 It is in Finnish
Noted, i will be sure to learn finnish before seeing the presentation.
@@Tommuli_Haudankaivajacan you by chance out the captions if so?
@@Udontlikeice I would need to make a lot of changes for me to feel comfortable about posting it on TH-cam. I'm kind of a perfectionist, and the PowerPoint was tailored for my not as bright classmates, which means that it's not fit for the audience I would want to capture here on TH-cam.
I would also need to add some extra information about the enrichment of both elements, since I simplified them too much.
What I'm trying to say with this reply, is that it would take quite a bit of effort for not that much reward to post it on TH-cam.
I don't usually like reaction videos but you actually add meaningful commentary I like it
Thank you!
When it comes to the passive safety poriton of the video, I think Sam may have gotten caught up on just how cheaper and cleaner Thorium's safety protocols are and some of the details got lost in translation to the mspaint slide show.
7:00
what he's trying to say is- yes you can insert control rods and it'll shut down...... but in an *everything hits the fans* situation, where it all goes wrong, nothing works..... those rods don't drop and uranium just keeps hyping itself up into overload
but Thorium can't without a kick start... so it's a lot easier to just remove the plutonium boost and it'll die off on it's own
Would it? Its a breeder reactor, meaning thorium will eventuoly become uranium and will start transforming other thorium to uranium. The thing which im not sure is if there is a time apam where you kept breeding it enought that you can remove uranium/plutonium and reaction will still keep going.
@@zzzzzz-lu6jwwrong
I would like to see a combination power plant using uranium to boost thorium. Alternatively I’ve heard some interesting conceptual designs using thorium synergistically with fusion reactors.
theres a university in the US, cant remember which one, thats using uranium 233 as a helper so its even more safe then 235 or plutonium
10:16 I wish Germany would get that memo
I was wondering whether you could cover a topic of natural nuclear reactors? I'm really curious whether history of energy production would change, if we would discovered this phenomenon much earlier?
Much appreciated
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo_Mine
@@kocherjuwtf that's just cursed, nature made a nuclear reactor and we still refuse to create these
"No enrichment needed" seems like a really, really compelling reason why we should be pursuing thorium
I'm slightly cynical and think nuance is lost on the average voter, therefore I think that thorium is mostly a politically safer nuclear power source. In places where the average citizen already got his mind made up, it would be political suicide to bring nuclear energy up again, for example in Germany... unless you've got a good pitch with all these slightly flawed safety arguments Sam also used here.
Uranium mines are known to be significant sources of radon gas due to the presence of uranium ore. When uranium in the ore decays, it produces radon gas as one of its decay products.
THIS is a great example of reactions that are TRANSFORMATIVE. not just some random guy saying “wow” while eating food or going to the bathroom.
Thank you!!
i love the thumbnails so much
Thanks!
This reaction video is spot on. Not too short, not too long. You know what you're talking about, but still keep it understandable. Good job
Thank you!
You should try the powder toy! (It is a game that you can find on google), it does contain many nuclear elements
Hey man, it didn't take me long to look up that radon is a direct decay product of uranium ore. I live in the Appalachias (they're lousy with uranium and every 15 years theres an energy bill deliberating on opening the mountains up for mining) and have grown up hearing about the dangers of radon. If I'm wrong then I'd be interested to hear what I'm getting wrong and corrected
Thanks for your comment! Yes, Uranium does eventually decay into Radon. However, there are multiple intermediate steps, some of which last millions or even billions of years. Uranium decays into Thorium first, then there are other steps, depending on the isotope. Radium is what decays directly into Radon. Thorium is actually closer to Radon than Uranium
I could have explained this better and I apologize for any confusion, I just didn't have the decay chains memorized when I made this video 😅
@@tfolsenuclearkeep up the good work! I really enjoy nerding out on the simplified edu-tainments by various creators.
@@tfolsenuclear You can't just gloss over the different isotopes like that.
Thorium occurs almost 100% as Th232. This produces, along its decay chain, only radon Rn220 with a half-life of 55 seconds.
Thus thorium ore with low uranium content will not tend to accumulate radon gas.
In contrast, U238 produces Rn222 with a half-life of almost four days, so it can accumulate to dangerous levels.
The intermediate steps don't matter in the way that you suggest. Except for the radon, all that stuff is solid and thus stays with the original ore. It is always present in well-defined ratios depending on the age of the ore (since it was last molten).
@@tfolsenuclear
Uranium 238 does not decay in to Thorium 232, which makes up 99.98% of all Thorium.
Thorium 232 only decays in to an isotope of radon with a half life of about 56 seconds.
The Radon that is an intermediate state of the decay chain of Uranium 238 down to stable Lead 206 has a half -life of about 3.8 days.
It is this radon 224 that is the issue, not the Radon 224.
at 8:30 here is the thing common people still talk about Chernobyl and Fukushima, that's their introduction to the bad cases of nuclear they dont have the know how to know about other worries. so him bringing that up is targeted at those cases and also for the common person with little to no know how on how these work, because that is what they worry about. not to mention that after all these years thorium is new has not had any problems caused with it yet, but uranium has had multiple problems happen that have had far reaching effects so it would be a lot easier to bring common people over to this then for something new with uranium.
Experimental thorium reactiors had its fare share of axxidents, you name it, irradiation of personel, meltodwns etc.
I'm pretty sure one of the decay products in the U 238 chain is radon gas. It's a big problem where I am because we have a lot of uranium and the gas gets caught in basements.
Hmm, well in an ideal capitalistic society you'd naturally want to promote an energy environment that used both efficiently. If Thorium is 3 times more plentiful and requires less effort to enrich the primary material then with that alone I'd expect 3 - 5 times the number of reactors created that use a Thorium based fuel system compared to Uranium. I don't see the plutonium/Uranium reaction starter as a drawback but rather a potentially more efficient use of rarer resources.
I also don't think that Thorium Nuclear reactors would just replace Uranium reactors all over the world or anything drastic like that, but I could see some Uranium reactors being used as partial production/enriching sites for the reaction starting material for Thorium reactors that might be nearby. I also think a few reactors may eventually be converted to use both becoming a 3 phase Thorium reactor, going from Uranium 235 > Uranium 238 > Plutonium 239 > Thorium 232 > Uranium 233 and then just going from Uranium 233 > Thorium 232 > Uranium 233 Recycling to start the process over and keep it resource cheap/efficient.
10:08
I think he's referring to a two fluid molten salt breeder reactor without realizing it, in which case the thorium is entirely consumed as it's converted into u235 through a neutron exposure then decay process.
This ups yoyr efficiency, or at least burn through rate, to insanely high levels, meaning you need far less thorium than even processed uranium
The issue is making a two fluid breeder reactor which is uh, hard
I thought the product was U-233 from Th-232. Thorium-232 plus a neutron becomes Thorium-233, which beta decays into Proactinium-233, which then beta decays into Uranium-233.
@@KamiNoBaka1 yup, and that u233 contributes to the fission heating, so it "burns up" into non actinide waste products
I think that the amount of uranium vs thorium in the crust is one of the biggest pros for thorium. Namely, in price just because of supply and demand. Most of the thorium mined today is seen as a byproduct or overburden and plenty is available right now, we just need to process it.
My biggest issue with nuclear power is quite simply that I don't know if I can trust the government or big businesses or whoever may own one of these things to be competent enough to handle it efficiently. Look at Fukushima, that wasn't a massive issue because the safety measures failed, that was a massive issue because the Japanese government was too incompetent to do anything about the failing safety measures in a timely manner.
Not even in a timely manner, they had a whole TWENTY YEARS of warnings and still did nothing for what was, in my opinion, a glaring issue. Who the hell puts the backup generators at sea level in a nuclear power plant on the coast directly in the line with one of the largest active subduction faults. Honest to god baffling, walls or no walls you add redundancy!
@@Coastal_Cruzer exactly, my whole issue with nuclear power isn't that it's not safe it's that people are incompetent
@@stephanie_jjb that I can completely understand and agree with
Legit the best reaction of a professional to a video on their field ive ever seen. And that is a surprisingly big category of videos.
We don't need to exclusively use Thorium.
However, *not* using Thorium would be pretty wasteful, and especially not using Thorium because were using fossil fuels instead would be... Well, my ma always told me what i should do if I can't say something nice....
For a nuclear engineer, a lot goes over your head.
That's right! Xenophonq is much smarter than a nuclear engineer 👍
@@m00thegamer thanks for saying so ☺️
@@XenophonQ for someone smarter than a nuclear engineer, a lot goes over your head.
@@m00thegamer it’s called sarcasm, brainlet.
@@m00thegamerlolololol
I've heard that thorium takes a very long time to ramp up power production, like on the scale of weeks. that sounds like you have way more time to react if everything goes wrong. but i guess that means it will not be practical to have a power grid where the thorium reactors produce more power than the minimum ever needed by the grid.
I suspect thorium will become more common in the near future, as it has a clean record in the public eye, unlike uranium. it's irrational, but public discourse tends to avoid complexities
The way the power market works, you'll have people with inflexible reactors offering a certain, low amount of money for the power they produce. Since it's not economical to reduce production, they benefit form selling all the power. Higher power demand means the people selling more expensive power will also produce, and the price rises to match the most expensive power being sold to cover the demand. More flexible reactors will command a higher price, since they can increase production for high demand, but don't really need to worry about the cost of reducing production, factoring in mostly opportunity cost. Hydroelectric power can deliver loads of power completely on demand, and can be used to cover any spontaneous peaks. They can stop producing power entirely if the demand doesn't go above the baseline formed by the inflexible reactors, that have to keep temperatures up no matter what. Thorium would form a very stable, very cheap but highly inflexible backbone to the power supply, and hydro power or similar would take the peaks. How much power would be produced in thorium reactors would be entirely dependent on market powers, which again depend on the infrastructure and ease of transferring electrical power. It would never be economical to cover the entire demand with thorium unless it literally only took one reactor, however. If you knew that all the power plants had to keep producing more power than you could ever use, regardless of payment, simply to keep their reaction alive, you'd bid less and less money until producers started going out of business and you reached a new equilibrium in the power market.
I would recommend the channel "Blue Jay" and his videos about radiation, for example the video "The Worst Radioactive Ideas in Nuclear History" or "Radiation in a Nutshell" would fit his expertise. ^^'
Thanks for the recommendations!
Correct me if im wrong but i love how nuclear reactors are just overcomplicated water boilers lol
That's it!
Well if you think about it all of our methods of making electricity (at least what comes to my mind) are simply converting mechanical energy into electricity. In most cases this mechanical energy is converted from thermal energy (car engines, coal power plants, nuclear power plants, ect.) using water, i.e. going from thermal energy->chemical energy-> mechanical energy -> electricity happens to be extremely efficient and something we got right the first time. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Of course converting through all those types of energy means some is lost due to entropy. It’ll be interesting to see if maybe we can come up with ways in the future to directly turn thermal energy in electricity.
You talked about how overheating isn't such a big problem, but what I'd like to know is what do you mostly worry about in nuclear reactions?
YESSS THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR REACTING TO THIS!!!!
You’re welcome!
I’m team nuclear all the way, I believe it belongs in use. Rteg’s have as much purpose for use in the aerospace industry as candu reactors do in civilian electricity generation, I would love to see a fully functional fusion reactor but that’s going to take some time. Helion is thankfully using a reverse field configuration confinement method, my only complaint about their design is that they are only extracting energy through the change in magnetic flux density and not also including energy extraction via the cooling system. I would hazard a wager that using multiple energy extraction methods will lead to better efficiency, then again, I don’t exactly have a degree in nuclear engineering. I’ve been interested in the subject and teaching myself plenty on a regular basis for over 6 years, auditing classes and courses since I can’t exactly afford that degree. I’ve also been desperate for hands on experience, but that’s not in the cards currently. Your content is excellent as far as I can tell, but this is the very first video of yours I’ve ever watched. Keep up the excellent work you chad.
Thing about nuclear reactions is that they are controlled until they are not, which is why the thorium safety was pointed out. When it's suddenly and unexpectedly becomes "not great, not terrible" you can do something to stop it pretty quickly and not take 100+ years of cleanup. Not to mention it's more about public perception
didnt Tyler have 5k subs like 2 days ago or something? hes already got 7k, thats a good growth!
Sam is the one true god of TH-cam. All hail Sam O'nella
Saw Thorium thought it was about the terraria mod. Stayed for the free science class.
The whole video I was thinking. Sam's whole thing at the start was about the abundance of Thorium vs Uranium. Then he introduced Plutonium. The purpose he stated about the Plutonium was the miniscule waste product. However you stated that much less Plutonium would be needed to weaponize compared to the drawn out Uranium path to weaponization. So My thoughts would trend towards using Uranium as the key to Thoriums starter. That would allow the relatively small pockets of Uranium to be stretched further as we would use less of it. Also you are using such a small amount when paired with Thorium that it isn't producing a ton of waste anyway.
It doesn't need specifically Plutonium. That's just the usual one used.
my guy, if you're reacting to a video talking about a subject dont stop right when the a topic is introduced to explain what the video is clearly just about to explain. I get doing it a couple of times as a force of habit but like, everytime?
Your knowledge of where radon comes from might need some brushing up, here's an excerpt from Wikipedia's radon page "It occurs naturally in minute quantities as an intermediate step in the normal radioactive decay chains through which thorium and uranium slowly decay into various short-lived radioactive elements".
13:49 With my government (Germany) I would stop the fear-mongering against nuclear power and reverse the terribly stupid decision to shut down all nuclear power plants...
Especially in times where we all want to use renewable energy, having a steady and reliable source of energy is extremely important, as hydro, wind, solar, etc. are all inherently unreliable (output wise).
I think tandum Uranium/Thorium plants are the ideal future. If I recall correctly, Thorium needs around 30 days to breed into usable fuel. That's a large lag time of both, not producing power after a shutdown and requiring a non-self-sustaining neutron source. Having a Uranium reactor to do both on site while that lag time occurs is probably the best option.
Nice 👌
8:15 that is when a failure goes as planned though. In either case backups for your backups backups is the best way to go.
He is saying that if a disaster happened and no one could interact with the reactor to shut it of (like what happened in Chernobyl and Fukashima), it would still turn off by itself due to how it was designed in the reactor designs he is talking about.
bro more sam onella even if it aint nuclear. this guy is the best educational youtuber on the platform
professor Dave man he's really good
Breeder reactors are the future of all energy! Im currently studying electrical engineering to eventually specialize in power engineering, and out of all sources, nuclear has always been my favorite. I want advice on if and how I could secure my position as an engineer in a nuclear plant some day.
And all my love towards nuclear originates from this Sam O'nella video to a point in which I was debating the title of nuclear "waste" as waste due to a majority of what we're dumping is fertile Uranium 238 that could be turned into an energy dense fissile Plutonium 239 with the actual waste products of fission being very miniscule with low half lives hovering around 30 years compared to 4.5 billion with U 238 and 20k with Plutonium (which acts as denser nuclear fuel by itself)
I also want to end up as an engineer on a nuclear power plant! I just started my first day of undergrad for it.
0:56 "toys r us r" is called "ya"
yes, Russian letters.
@@Uilyam719 cyrillic
@@Xnoob545 i know, i was going to put that but i cant spell and i did not want to get laughed at.
Well, technically, it isn't since it isn't written in Cyrillic
You sort of gloss over it here, but the big thing with uranium is the ability to use the fast reactor. they are far more effective than conventional ones, but due to regulation they are banned because of fear of proliferation. If that were not the case, uranium would be a far more effective fuel source than thorium, in my opinion, but since it is not, thorium due to its volume on Earth is the obvious choice.
It'd be cool if you played with the Minecraft Big reactors mod and see what the mod makers got right and what they got wrong and how they could improve it.
Funny enough. The backwards R is actually a part of the cyrillic alphabet.
Well done reaction with very nice additional context/information.
Might I suggest the videos by BlueJay on the topic of radiation/nuclear history?
Gotta love a guy who trys to provide his knowlage to people who have shown some interest, and is open to corrections in the comments. TH-cam needs more of people like this. Thanks for the video, hope you never need your SCRAM!
Wow, when I suggested this yesterday I would not have thought it would come out the next day. Thank you, and good commentary
I'm team Dyson swarm/beamed solar.
Fission's great in the medium term, but neither uranium or thorium is going to last us 4 billion years.
Brother we can't even make it a decade without having a massive international combat
We are not making it 4 billion years at this pace
3:21: Well Radon is a decay product of Uranium, so it is linked to sides where you would mine that. But it's also in the decay chain of thorium, so I don't know how that is supposed to be different.
I looked so long for this comment, thank you!
Thorium 232 produces radon 220 with a half-life of 55 seconds. Uranium 238 produces radon 222 with a half-life of almost four days. This means that the uranium-produced radon can travel further distances from the actual ore trough the cracks in the rock, and accumulate more. The rates of production are probably also different, but that would require you to do equilibrium calculations based on all the half-life's of the intermediate isotopes; and you need to know the ore concentrations.
7:40 I think what Sam was getting at here is that enriched uranium 235 can go critical on it's own, and if it's not already in some kind of safety system, it can go out of control, whereas since thorium needs a little kick, it's safer to handle up to the point that it's in the reactor.
He was just referring to uranium decaying into radon
Does Radon not come from both uranium *and* thorium decaying?
Yes, some of it does! Though, it is pretty far down the decay chain - radon comes directly from radium. Thorium is actually closer to radon since uranium decays into thorium.
I think Sam was thinking more about earlier reactors, where fuel/controls could get dostorted and bent and stuck.
It did USED to be a problem. And it seemed like elhaving enough coolant in such an emergency was, idk, forgotten?
Deemed impossible due to arrogance?
Again, yes. Today, nbd.
Its just like how EVERY CAR used to have metal dashboards and solid steering columns (ie not collapsable).
My dad, as a doc, always talks ab9ut having to "unwrap people" from steering wheels.
That and how SafetyGlass was a miracle.
Plastic surgery has roots in windshield UNsafety glass.
Like a blender atacked rhe face.
Thats where it staryed, along with fixing cleft palates. So people could just be people and.not be gawked at amd ridiculed.
Plastic surgery NOW...
Not quite so noble and wholesome, in some cases. But who i am to judge?
0:12 A decade.
Gravitas.
I’m very much Team Thorium/Uranium, but also Team Fusion. Fusion is the holy grail, and we desperately need to develop it into a useable energy source. That’s one of my goals in college, to become a physicist and work in fusion. What are your thoughts on fusion, if I may ask?
this is incredible
usually not huge on react content but holy hell did you add a lot of interesting nuance to this topic
Thanks, I appreciate that!
Thorium MSRs are "Solar Roadways" tier tech. Sounds nice in theory, is an absolute mess in practice.
I don't know the decay chains but google tells me radon decays from radium and uranium. I also don't know what materials are normally found together.
I do remember some talks having trouble mining rare earths because of thorium content and related disposal.
Yeah, and that radium isotope is the end product of a chain of decay that started with Uranium 238.
It is in between Radon and Uranium.
BRING ON THE NUCLEAR BABYYYYY
IM TALKING
SOLAR
GEOTHERMAL
AND
REACTORS BABYYYYY
I’m the weirdo cuz even with the supposed danger I’m comparing it to the long term damage we’ve already done and seeing it as a an acceptable risk. Considering most of my concerns have been addressed, I don’t get why we still don’t have more
Yes! This was a match made to happen!
Sam sold me. I'm team thorium. But my big hope is we go nuclear before solar or wind.
My guess is the reason thorium will end up being the more popular option is because of how much more efficient the mining process is and the availability of the material.
Cheap cheap
at some point we'll be fusing cosmic hydrogen to iron atoms/breaking down all atoms into into iron, speeding up the heat death of the universe
Seriously the only problem with nuclear power is that you need better staff because more authorities are watching your ass.
Good to get some clarification, i love Salmonella. I think the safety thing might be from info thats older or atleast i was under the impression that older power plants have had control rod protections and redudencies fail. Let me know if im thinking about it different and i know modern reactors are generally made safer than older plants like 50 years ago.
Salmonella
Salmonella? hmm, i'm more of a fan of E-coli.
@@Hat-Kid E-coli?!? These new generations are spoiled, back in my day it was just Coli. Not everything has to be electric or on the internet.
Thorium would be great for countries like India simply because they have _so much of it._
Honestly though, I'd be curious to know how many times uranium waste can be reprocessed until you break even with the energy you get out of it.
I like the fact that Thorium takes little effort to refine it for use in generating power. Plus the abundance of it ..and the ease of mining it.
Reactor meltdowns like 3 Mile Island, cherynoble and Fukishiama were (if i recall correctly) poorly (and cheaply) designed reactors. Design and building of a nuclear reactor is something that we should never cheap out on
From Not a nuclear engineer, but a nuclear physicist: Radon is a daughter of Uranium. i.e. in the decay chain og uranium, so it is procuded by uranium, and always found in uranium depostist. Sam O Nella Academy vs T Folse Nuclear: 1 - 0
7:57 Correcting a nuclear engineer is dangerous business, especially if you're a random layman, but here goes: Don't you mean "negative void coefficient" when you say "negative reactivity coefficient"?
Hahaha! Please feel free to challenge my statements!
A negative void coefficient is a type of negative reactivity coefficient! The one I talked about in this video was a negative temperature coefficient.
Negative void coefficient = increase amount of steam in reactor vessel, power goes down.
Negative temperature coefficient = increase temperature of reactor coolant, power goes down.
Negative reactivity coefficient = increase in , power goes down.
Hope that helps!
@@tfolsenuclear Thanks!
i love your smile and energy this was such a fun video to watch and i learned a lot! your positivity is refreshing
Still wondering why you use the mouse to click on pause and play, you know space bar works too ?
lol 41%
You know K works too?
@@sneed. 41% what ?
@@kricku Oh I didn't knew this one, thanks :)
I think he meant that Radon 222 is part of the decay series of Uranium 235, and can be expected to accumulate to higher concentrations in Uranium mines. His point isn’t completely valid since Thorium 232 also has an isotope of Radon in its decay series, albeit a shorter lived one.
I'd love to hear your opinion on dual fluid reactor technology.
I was promised a Thorium reactor car about 20 years ago or so. Still waiting on that. I always wondered how they would incorporate reactor shielding into my sedan's design.
Pro: never needing gas... ever.
Con: driving around with basically a flux capacitor (assuming my tiny Thorium reactor would need a tiny Plutonium pellet helper to maintain fission reactivity.)
i wonder if you could use electric energy from radiation instead of water steam turbines to compactify the reactor
@@sakesaurusTo be honest waterless nuclear reactors would be very revolutionary on their own.
A bit of warning, Sam O'Nella reacted very negatively to reaction videos of his stuff. I'd recommend against reacting to his videos as you might end up with strikes on your channel. It happened to Vlogging Through History... Edit: Sorry, my mistake, that was CGP Grey that reacted negatively to reaction videos.
I think you might be a little too close to the problem to really see what people actually talk about. Certainly, people who are in the field who know what they're doing aren't as concerned with runaway reactors. The general population, however, is VERY concerned with runaway reactors. It is instilled in a lot of us that nuclear is bad, and every nuclear reactor is a nuclear bomb we put on our beaches, waiting to detonate and send us into some nuclear zombie apocalypse, all because of stuff like 3 mile island and chernobyl, as well as general media sensationalism. That's where Thorium's passive safety comes in. If literally everything goes wrong, you can still stop Thorium from exploding with little more than some basic engineering. If literally everything goes wrong with uranium, all you can do is evacuate the area, because it's just going to go until it blows up. Yes, safety measures are far better now, and the chance of that happening is unlikely. However, if Fukushima taught us anything, it's that standards will be ignored, and safety precautions will be caught in the interest of minor convenience or saving money.
I want small Polonium reactors.
7:48 what I think he means is that is easier to make safe precautions againdt thorium and not that aren't already easy safe ways to shut uranium down