I see this kind of comment all the time, but it doesn't make sense. Just learning a basic overview is always fun and easy to package in a nice, entertaining way. But you go to university to learn the details, get down and dirty with the math and all the other components of what you learn. No matter how hard you try, making differential equations fun is impossible. It's not something you can nearly package and communicate like this content is.
@@skylarkesselring6075 Diffy Q's can be fun. It just takes a good instructor and the right mindset in the student. But there are many instructors that can make it tiresome. If you enjoy solving logical puzzles, are able to keep up with the homework and don't hesitate to seek help when you don't, you should be good. It helps to recognize elegance and mathematical beauty when you see it as it adds to your enjoyment, also it helps when you come to see you are learning a language of a sort, a language that best describes how our universe functions.
@@ErwinPommel Charles Forsberg is an MIT Nuclear Department professor. He teaches fuel cycle, iirc. He is very animated compared to most professors. He speaks at a LOT of conferences, and takes his PhD students to speak, and does a great job supporting them.supports them.
There is a new reactor type that does not require complex expensive reprocessing, only conversion from oxide to chloride, no separations. That reduces cost 10x vs the IFR method, and reduces proliferation concerns more than the IFR pyro-processing. These are Molten Chloride Salt Fast Reactors they eliminate cladding absorptions, but can't get the Fissile density of solid fuel.
I studied mechanical engineering in university, and I even took nuclear energy engineering modules, and I hated it! If only I had a professor like this one who is genuinely engaging
3:42 - I never realize this ... it is much easier to separate out plutonium from uranium, different elements, than it is refine different isotopes of uranium. I guess that should be obvious, but it never occurred to me. I learned something.
Ive just taken two nuclear chem courses, one radiopharmaceutical chem course and a solvent extraction course and this series is such an amazing recap of all ive learned this last half year! Awesome vids, your vids will help a lot of students...and hopefully just curious people as well!
I reckon you're right handed. Professor will yku make a video on Thorium liquid salt reactors please? Norway and Indonesia are experimenting with them. Kirk Sorensen is a good source of information.
Helps solve waste problem making nuclear energy even more 'greener' Definitely the right way to go. India has designed this type of reactor. It should come on line shortly.
Dear Professor. I have learned so much from you this year and I’m deeply grateful. By way of repayment, I would advise you to consult with any competent sound engineer to improve the audio in your wonderful videos. They so deserve it!
Lithium is bomb fuel, whether or not it's Lithium- 6 or Lithium-7. It's used to build hydrogen bombs. How could it serve as a control rod when it readily takes part in nuclear reactions?
@@taraswertelecki9886 Fusion, not fission. Lithium can be used in fusion. I mean, technically carbon can also undergo fusion, what's the point here exactly?
have you heard of the MCSFR? it's a fast spectrum molten salt reactor that doesn't require ANY fuel fabrication or reprocessing. it's just a vat of chloride salts that fission for 40 years, eventually getting batch-processed once (just removal of fission products, not even separating the actinides) and split into two reactors
how do you get the fuel without fabrication into chloride salts then... as well as the better question: how do you force the fission products AND higher order products to bind only with the chloride process instead of the housing, components, sensors, pumping system and wherever else they are when they occur? Because it doesn't occur ONLY in the "perfect little box" and Hopey McWishy doesn't stop bad byproducts like inert gasses from screwing everything up.
I work on molten-salt reprocessing, and I can tell you that it's only possible to remove about 40% of the fission products without removing the actinides, at least by any chemical method currently known to humanity. Rb, Cs, Y, Ba, Sr, and all the lanthanides REQUIRE proir actinide removal to be separated from salts.
@@richardfitzhugh6628 Correct, and we WANT to keep the Cs and Sr with the actinides to prevent saltbfreezing casualty easier, and reduce the melting point of the eutectic with CsCl
Please have a look at the work done at Moltex Energy. Caesium and Iodine become salts within the fuel. Gasses escape from the fuel pins do have minimal poisoning effect. There is no water in the core so neutrons cannot crack it into hydrogen and oxygen. It runs in the fast spectrum - no moderator but more importantly it burns the actinides so the used fuel has an active life of 300 years. The fuel is molten salt, but they coolant is also the same variety of molten salt (though no actual fuel of course). Heat is moved by convection to a tertiary salt which raises steam. It’s a burner fast reactor but there are no pumps on the core and no risky elements like sodium.
excellent. Would you happen to have some more chemistry details on the fuel reprocessing? Chemically it's a jumble of atoms and ions. Still any serious effort to combat climat change will have to include around 5000 1500 MW breeder reactors plus the thermal ones that feed plutonium into the breeders. we simply have no other choice.
We have a choice. De-growth. Infinite growth and consumption on a finite planet is unsustainable. There aren't unlimited resources and the ecosystem is already in BIG trouble. The future of most of our species is on very shaky ground.
@@markgigiel2722 Over the past 20 years the population growth rate has been decreasing, and mathematical models show our growth rate will begin to hit the negative relatively soon. Next, nuclear energy is not the end all be all, but it's the best option we have right now with the increased CO2 emissions influencing climate change. Once we can stabilize that issue, it will give us more time to develop resources towards effective energy storage tech, that does not require large amounts of rare-earth metals, finally enabling practical use of solar and wind, which feed off the energy of the sun. If you argue the sun is not a finite source of energy... well everyone has known that the sun is going to burn out eventually, but that should be humanity's target right now, live as long as the sun lives. I'm also aware that the energy crisis is not the only issue right now. Heck, farming and agriculture are being wasteful and destructive of resources alone. Lookup phosphorus depletion. A lot of this is due to bad practices over using nutrients in fields, having the nutrients bleed into waterways/ocean, killing off marine life, which is a big portion of the phosphorus resource (fish mill). But there is a lot of research going into resolving this issue due to toxic algal bloom infesting many coastal inlets of first world countries. A lot of research is going into alga farming because of this. A classic example of "If god gives you lemons, make lemonade." Keep your hopes up, there is a lot of work going into finding solutions. Some of which are right in front of you, being professors sharing their knowledge on a free open platform like youtube ;D
@@TickyTack23 I think we already crossed the Rubicon. We are so far into overshoot on every front that it's just a matter of time until complete collapse and possible extinction. Have a nice day. I've been following the trends since I was a kid and I'm 61 now. You won't change my opinion.
Excellent presentation on an important existential threat to life. Breeder reactor consumption of high level waste seems the most practical way of securing the long term safety of the planet. Great job in the presentation. My concern is the current production of spent fuel rods from LWR reactors around the world are being inventoried to vaults. Perfectly safe in a technological age and ready for re-processing. The problem is the large inventory of trans-uranic elements in these vaults if civilization devolves without reducing this inventory. The vaults will eventually fail and given the long half-lives of some of these materials, serious contamination to water tables and the environment is possible in thousands of years. Reducing the standing inventory provides long term safety to life.
As a counterpoint, consider this video from the same professor, about the natural nuclear reactor in Oklo, Gabon: th-cam.com/video/pMjXAAxgR-M/w-d-xo.html Towards the end, he explains that the geology of the site is just about a worst-case scenario for migration of the products of fission, and yet they're all still there.
Muon-catalysed reactions are interesting, a Muon-reactor could reduce half-lifes significantly. The question is, will anyone build a reactor to power a muon reactor? We could start reprocessing some waste.
There is a problem with Muons though, the energy made to create them currently outweighs the benefits you gain from them, not just for reducing waste but also making more efficient fission and later on fusion reactors. Unless we can make Muons with less energy and more yield per energy, that plan will be shelved until more effiicient reactors can breed them.
You are an excellent teacher. It's unrelated, but I like your clear-board setup. You must be pretty good at writing backwards (assuming that's not digitally produced).
Why should we use sodium as a coolant? It catches fire when exposed to air and explodes on contact with water. As far as I can see the molten chloride salt fast reactor uses pretty much the same mechanism as the IFR but seems to be much much safer to operate.
Indeed. Theres also the lead cooled FBR which is an even better «breeder» . But the cool thing about the MCSFR tech is the processing of fuel and waste. Nuclear waste from water reactors comes in, fission products come out. You just turn the transuranics, plutonium and the uraniums into chloride salts and throw them into the reactor. Much simpler than fabricating fuel rods. The problem with MSRs in general is corrosion.
Is it possible to use centrifuges to enrich uranium and plutonium from the fission products entirely powered by nuclear power plants? I imagine that transmutations requires lots of energy that can be reached with nuclear power plants.
IFR never had any in reactor building pyro-processing. GE PRISM is the commercialized version of IFR, and there is no plans for the pyro-processing to occur in the reactor containment.
I have a question: once uranium is enriched, can it be unenriched back to U238? I ask because I’m curious if all the highly enriched uranium in all the bombs that exist in the world can be turned back into 3-4% reactor fuel.
Its called downblending. And the US is thinking about using some of its Uranium bombs to make 20% U235 reactor aka HALEU fuel for the demonstration Natrium reactors in Wyoming (the Natrium is a breeder designed to «breed and burn»no reprocessing needed). Then you can give it U238.
Ya say that nobody would have an issue with digging something radioactive up then putting it back at the same radiation level, but we don't mine heavy rare earths in the united states due to Thorium contamination, which if you mixed it with a small amount of dirt you could put the Thorium back into the ground at the same concentration.
3:40 Actually only the bomb dropped in Hiroshima was made of U235. The bomb dropped in Nagasaki was made of Pu239 so they figured it before they had any bomb. They just did not know if the implosion used in a Pu239 bomb worked. That is why they used one of the three plutonium bombs they had in a test explosion.
My mother said bol-pen referring to a dry-ink-pen. On the other hand, it is actually a bold-point pen. pen = ka-lam = pen-sil pen = qalam (Ar) pen-sil = mirsamun (Ar)
Troy Schofield Isotopic seperation is needed to produce weapons grade Plutonium from spend fuel, reactors however, can operate using Plutonium from spent fuel
I have found two things in the public domain that somewhat refute the professor in tiny details. 1. He says reactor grade plutonium cannot be made to use for a weapon. Our geniuses have in fact detonated reactor grade in a weapon. Any time you get criticality and go onto chain fission he knows you can then use the xray flux to promote deuterium hybrid to also go critical in the thermal. Much easier to make deuterium than separate isotopes as we know and you don't even need lithium 7 that we found to our dismay in the south pacific. More later.
No need to reprocess. chop up the fuel pellets and chuck them into the Elysium Industries molten chloride fast breeder reactor. Done, fuel as a profit center.
It's ok in a reactor. The problem for making bombs is the Pu-240, it sometimes spontaneously fissions and releases neutrons. This is a problem because it tends to make the chain reaction start too soon when the bomb is detonated. The bomb still explodes but with much less energy. Pu-240 also emits gamma rays as it decays which makes handling the warhead a lot more dangerous.
The US Russia Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement as amended in 2010 (ipfmlibrary.org/PMDA2010.pdf) says non-weapons grade Plutonium is Pu with
Can you add the thorium ore radioactivity horizontal lines on the beginning decay curve? Thorium ore is natural and more radioactively radio-hazardous than U ore. The LWRwaste might be under the Th ore line at 1000 years.
Thorium ore is commonly left piled in the open as waste during mining and milling operations for other materials. Not all that hazardous. Power plant waste using thorium fuel varies depending on the type of plant of course but tends to be composed of a material mix that as a whole decays to ore equivalent level in a shorter period of time than typical uranium fuel.
Let me make sure I get this right: the best we can (theoretically, because in many cases this is not even being done yet) do is high level radioactive waste that needs to be kept safe for 500 years. For comparison, check the life expectancies of the frame conditions necessary: steel concrete: 100+yrs, written records: 200+yrs, stable political systems: 50-250yrs, periods without war: 50-150yrs. Do you feel lucky?
I think he's writing on a sheet of glass, the camera is recording it through the glass backwards and then in post-processing they're flipping it on a vertical axis to get writing that goes forwards from our perspective.
They told me 30 years ago, that they will do laser enrichment soon. Now, 30 years later they still don't have a industrial working solution to separate isotopes with Lasers.
@@shawnnoyes4620 I know that all, it was already known in the 90 that's why i was talking about. But it's still NOT used for hundreds of tons of nuclear waste. Which means that it's still not working in an industrial manner thus we can put that on the side.
@@OpenGL4ever (1) It will probably be used for Paducah, Kentucky tailings at some point, then it can go from engineering to industrial scale. (2) If it is proved out there, then you could use as part of the Fluoride volatility reprocessing for SNF (e.g., google Progress in development of Fluoride volatility reprocessing technology Jan Uhlíř). (3) So, I would say do not put it aside ... (4) I get it would only really be good for the first step of the Fluoride volatility processing of Uranium 235 & Uranium 238 enrichment. Though, it would be interesting for separating out U233 and dovetail with Uranium 232 to aid in non-proliferation. (5) I am assuming that the U/Pu step (next) you could put in a Denatured MSR or Molten Chloride Salt Fast Reactor.
Also you'd have to quantify the amount of mass it's heating up, what the mass is, etc. I think a better question is how much energy is given off by a single fission. It's not a lot, considering how small atoms are. I mean heck, PET scans literally induce matter/antimatter annihilation inside our own bodies. But since the mass is so small, we're fine. Bottom line: you sound young. Ask a teacher
to have heat you must have a medium. The sun's rays are not hot, but when they get to earth, they go through the air, which is the medium. The medium is getting warm, not the rays. When the rays hit your skin, your skin becomes the medium. The rays interact with your atoms, the atoms heat up, and you feel warm, but the rays do not actually carry heat, just energy. The Dr. gave you the amount of volts it gives off. That energy flies in all directions, but it sounds like some gets trapped in the fragments of the broken atom.
Dumb question here. If we use water as a moderator to catalyze the reaction within the reactor, why do we store used fuel rods next to each other while submerged in water?
Thanks for the answer! If I can ask a follow up, how is it absorbed? Is that how we make deuterium and tritium?(I know we can get them from sea water, but can we synthesize it in any usable capacity) Does the water absorb the neutrons that way or is there another mechanism that is at play?
@@ktinsley4579 After leaving a reactor fuel emits practically no neutrons. Surrounding the fuel with MASS (in the form of water) shields from gamma radiation. And the water is a great coolant. The fuel rods are not closely packed and the water may be "poisoned" so criticality is avoided and moderation is unimportant.
Separating two different elements by chemical means is much easier and cheaper than separating two different isotopes from the same element. Simple example: Water is a molecule consisting of one atom hydrogen and 2 atoms oxygen. If i want to separate them, i only need electrical power and do a little electrolysis. Separating Deuterium from Protium, which are both hydrogen, is much more difficult and energy consuming. Also keep in mind. When the built the first to nuclear bombs, they gone the difficult way of creating an implosion bomb design. The reason why they do this was, because getting enough Uranium 235 for a gun design bomb was very energy and time consuming and in 1945, they had only enough Uranium 235 for just one bomb. It would have taken another year to make another one. But with the implosion design, which uses plutonium 239 and not uranium 235. They could create much more plutonium 239 in a breeder reactor, than they could enrich uranium 235. Thus to make a lot of bombs, the Plutonium 235 and implosion design was the way to go.
@@flashers.5212 He writes normally on a glass pane and then in editing mirrors the video to reverse the writing and make it legible to the viewer. Makes it look like he's writing backwards.
Yea, some time ago I was thinking he is a really good backwards-writer, but if you look close....there are a few obvious clues that these guys are mirror-reversing the resulting video. No big deal....I'm like a sponge, soaking up the content as fast as it comes out (adding my own thought and research to the end result in my head). I don't even notice his writing anymore.
France still has waste, both fission products and burned MOX fuel that is planned to be buried, like burned U, is planned in the US and Finland. Burned MIX is the same as LWR waste. Yes the waste volume is less/MWe, but only by about 12%.
The only way you can get this perspective are either curved mirrors or writing backwards, no other explanation and the dude's teaching nuclear physics so i don't think he's the kind of guy that takes stuff easy, how is that improbable? If i get a suspect of a crime that was a teacher writing backwards on glass i'd definetly go after physicists.
All of You guys above are wrong. He is standing in front of the camera and has a transparent plexiglass "blackboard" between him and the camera. He actually writes normally not backwards. No digital mambo-jambo required just simple geometry :) Simple proof: stand in front of the mirror and "write" something in the air. You will notice that the direction of letters in the mirror is the same as if You were writing them on a sheet of paper. The image You see in the mirror is exactly what You see when You watch a recording made by camera. Add the transparent blackboard to the mix and there You have it. Try it out at home - it works ;p
Statement that power reactor Pu will not make a bomb is FALSE. USA fired a weapon in 1962 at the NV test area made with approx. 22% Pu 240 extracted from fuel used in a British reactor. It had about 10kt yield. Repeated statements are on record by USA weapons developers that it is not impossible, just harder to engineer into a small package (more heat is produced by some of the other Pu isotopes, especially Pu238) and more dangerous for anyone working around it due to higher emmissions.
@@OpenGL4ever The US government STILL HAS NOT DECLASSIFIED THIS. The historical truth runs contrary to the politically required public perception of this issue. Witness the professor here, who 50+ years after the event still took the official version as being fact? My Info on what happened has been pieced together from several sources. Look here for what was officially released during the Carter administration: www.osti.gov/opennet/forms?formurl=document/press/pc29.html Note that everything from the total yield to the NAME of the test is still classified? Why would that be, if it supported the official line, that reactor grade Pu is useless for weapons production? And why did Jimmy Carter PERSONALLY feel in necessary to put out the tiny bit of information we are given, the mere fact that the test had occurred and not been a fizzle? Got to love at least one aspect of Jimmy Carter, he had a Sunday school teacher level of compulsive truth telling AND was a military officer with a degree in nuclear engineering, fi ally granted presidential level of clearance. A good man, but a badly handicapped politician thereby. Separately, one may finds information that British dual use reactor (power AND weapons Pu generation) reprocessed fuel was used because USA officially doesn't reprocess power reactor fuel AND that Hanford weapons Pu production facilities FAILED to create the requested 20% + Pu240, since the cans of fuel would swell, jam and burst in the channels when subjected to the longer than designed for dwell time. The Hanford reactors managed to produce only a small ammount of approx. 15% Pu 240, about 10 kilos, and 1.5 kilos of 20% from a high energy materials testing reactor, which was promptly requisitioned away by another, still undisclosed part of the USA nuclear establishment as being earmarked for them via a "prior request" of theirs! One wonders who had more pull than the bomb boys in 1962?! More as I go back to original sources, I went down this rabbit hole a while back and did not save all the links I should have. Google will pull up a large part of this piecemeal if you just LOOK. Then, look for what various knowledgable physicists and engineers have come to believe about the matter from the public domain information and WHY. Then apply Clarke's first law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.” www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/787/can-reactor-grade-plutonium-be-used-nuclear-weapons
A power reactor produces Pu239 along with Pu240 and some of its heavier isotopes. Only the former is good for making weapons; with a low plutonium yield and 2/3 of that being unusable isotopes, power reactors are poor at producing plutonium for weapons manufacture.
@@Akira-wh9mw Please, do not discount the production of Pu 238! That's a source of difficulty as well, beyond the Pu 240 & heavier isotopes... Perhaps you should read the links I provided, then go back and watch the video where the poor professor states unequivocably that you CAN NOT use high burnup power reactor Pu for a weapon AT ALL. Which is false, as had been shown by a live weapon test using a high burnup power reactor fuel sourced Pu isotope mixture in USA back in 1962. I do not dispute that a first level nuclear weapons state such as USA, Russian Federation, UK, France, China or Israel would PREFER to use "weapons grade" Pu composed of 93% or better Pu 239. But ANY power reactor or weapons production isotope sourced Pu isotope mix (short of 80% Pu238) CAN be weaponized, as admitted by IAEC.
If one is ok with a lower yield and a need for a little extra shielding around the core, it's perfectly possible, and even not terribly difficult, to make a nuclear weapon with the mix of plutonium that comes out of LWRs (it's also called "reactor-grade plutonium"). There are very clear statements by weapons designers on this point, and one can find enough material from a simple google search for "nuclear weapons from reactor grade plutonium" that it's not necessary to provide sources here. On the other hand, the thorium fuel cycle eventually produces plutonium 238, which actually CAN'T be used in nuclear weapons (though its precursor, neptunium, definitely can).
Please reference where any nation state has made a nuclear bomb out of reactor-grade plutonium. They would simply leverage a graphite reactor and pull fuel out early and process via PUREX to get pure PU239. This is nonsense.
@@adamdanilowicz4252 U233 makes as good a weapon as weapons grade Pu239, but can use an easier gun type weapon as well. U233 is easily obtained separate from even U232.
@@paulspyckerelle703 Sodium burns when exposed to air. Radioactive sodium releases it into the ambient atmosphere. Severe thermal stress problems occurred caused by cyclical thermal fluid flow in piping. large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph241/abdul-kafi1/
What you need to do is step away from heavy elements and go to Nickel 63. It is a pure beta emitter and a metal, with a half life of 100 years. This way you can have safe nuclear energy and no nuclear proliferation. The breeders for Ni63 can be made to work on heavy hydrogen (Deuterium) in plasma state where you can produce Tritium and free neutrons. With Nickel 63 you cannot have it go critical (no fission and no neutron radiation).
Nickel 63 is not fissionable. How do you want make energy with Nickel 63? You might use the Tritum for nuclear fusion, but there is still a long way to go for nuclear fusion reactors. In about 15 years we will know more.
@@OpenGL4ever Nickel 63 is a radioactive BETA emitter. It only gives off ELECRONS, which means you can harvest them DIRECTLY and not through thermo-nuclear conversion that we use nowadays. I agree with you however that we are decades away from this as, conveniently, almost no-one talks about this. It seems they like their fission byproducts polluting this world.
@@DBuilder1977 Nickel 63 has a half-life of around 100 years. To make energy of radioactive decay at that low decay rate for energy production you will need a lot of Nickel 63 isotopes concentrated at the same place. And to separate them from other Nickel isotopes, especially the ones, that are not radioactive, you will need a lot of energy. Thus in theory you might use the electrons, but in practice this is not feasible. It's even very likely that your separation process will require more energy than you can gain by the radioactive decay. If it were that simple, we would use radioactive waste to generate electricity directly, but except for radioisotope generators this is usually not done. In nuclear waste there are more than enough isotopes that do a beta decay too. And some of them do decay a lot faster, thus, the power of beta emission is much higher.
@@OpenGL4ever Well, Plutonium has a half life of 400 years, which is 4 times weaker than Nickel 63 so your argument doesn't hold, Nickel 63 is 4 times stronger than Pu!!! Also, to separate the isotopes, you needs JUST a centrifuge so where is the "a lot of energy" needed? The reason they don't use it still is that you cannot get a bomb out of it.
@@DBuilder1977 Take a look at the decay products of nuclear waste. Some are in the range of seconds, minutes and hours. A centrifuge doesn't run without energy and they consume a lot of energy. Take a look at this video, it clearly shows the costs of isotope separation: th-cam.com/video/CodBk7xewRk/w-d-xo.html
Any new reactor has to compete with 2 cents/kwh wind and solar, and can't. I'm interested in what we are actually doing with the spent fuel, and what we should do with it. I expect companies that shut down an old reactor will want to unload them, and avoid spending any money on them, and taxpayers will get stuck with the bill. My favorite solution so far is Yucca moutain, because it requires the least amount of effort long term.
Wind and solar add 2 cents/kwh to some other reliable electricity, usually the inefficient type of natural gas plant. The spent fuel rods still have 98% of their energy left in them and will be used in the new types of reactors in the licensing phase right now.
@@chapter4travels Is that the story you tell yourself to make yourself feel like you are right? It's true that variable renewabled are a PIA for old school baseload generators that are not designed to follow load. Now if you only had one solar pannel, or one turbine, in one spot with no grid connecting them, no storage, no ability to charge your car when electricity is cheap. Basically it's only like that in the minds of nuclear proponents, cause when all you want to use is a hammer, every screw looks like a stupid nail.
@@fjalics Well it's like that all over the world, renewables need a 100% demand sized reliable electricity source backup. You might find an exception in the most ideal place on the globe but this is the rare exception, not the rule. There is no battery technology that can be used everywhere, and if there was, it would wreck what little economics they have.energycentral.com/c/ec/catch-22-energy-storage
@@chapter4travels That's false, and not even the right question. When was the last time the wind stopped blowing in all of North America? Oh right, never. If you have 24 hours of storage, and enough solar to cover your lowest day, you can do it. www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2020/ But enough theory, how about practice? Iowa produces 42% of their electricity with wind. Do tell all the terrible repercussions of adding all that wind power, with links.
@@fjalics Ever heard of line loss? The biggest problem Germany has is transmission line access, every country will have that problem. Germany is the perfect example of what not to do. Also, electricity only represents about 25% of total energy demand, what will cover the rest? Nuclear has none of those problems, only ignorance and political problems.
If you seal a nuclear reactor, close all valves, bulkheads and such while running at full power, cut off any water supply, said reactor becomes a bomb. Not a very effective/powerful bomb, but still one capable of flattening the power plant where it was running. Don't forget the nuclear materials ejected into the surrounding areas.
Depends on the reactor but most would just automatically SCRAM in that situation, shutting down and adding coolant. If cooling is insufficient and all emergency backups were to fail, then the nuclear material would likely melt and collect at the bottom of the containment vessel. If the plant is of a very old design type that lacks some of these safety features, then it would likely melt straight down to collect on the foundation of the building or in the worst case into the ground underneath. The main potential causes of an explosion would be excessive steam pressure or hydrogen gas buildup, in modern designs they would release this pressure at planned points while keeping the containment vessel intact and little or no radioactive material is likely to escape with it.
@@stupidburp Moreover, EBR-II was tested with a circulation failure event. Thermal expansion changed the geometry og the core so it became subcritical.
We could debate over this ? Or Just agree that earth has become one big toilet and we are trashing it with every passing decade.. I believe there's no turning back .. Global warming is a fact !! And most scientists believe we are pushing to the point of no return!!! You do make a good valid point ...
@Matt S I'm more irritated about the fact he just left and deleted the evidence. Arguing about this sort of thing is kinda fun, to be honest. Still, that guy was noting compared to someone like BeatifulGirlByDana (who is, in fact, an old man who makes crude sharpie drawings of radiation trefoils while saying dumb shit like "if I had a dixie cup of yellowcake I would die within 10 seconds", "Fukushima caused a hurricane" and, perhaps my favourite, "California is a radioactive wasteland, how can it not be a wasteland" (I'm paraphrasing, I honestly cannot stand to listen to him for more than a minute before I suffer brain damage)) Also, I don't mind solar too much, it's just some people see it as a silver bullet to climate change when it's a part of solving part of the climate crisis. Putting wind and solar in Nuclear Power Plant exclusion zones isn't a horrible idea(though cooling towers could be of issue for wind turbines and they could block light for solar panels, both simply due to the size of the cooling towers seen at many power plants, particularly in the US where around the time most nuclear power plants were built there were rules from the EPA that required cooling towers).
They have been hiding safe nuclear energy for some while now because they need the Plutonium for their bombs. There are many ways to get energy from nuclear radiation. The best is a direct conversion to electricity by beta decay. Only the lighter elements undergo beta decay so the trick is using light elements. Two pure beta emitters exist: Tritium and Nickel 63. The former is a gas and is hard to contain whereas the latter is a metal. Nickel 63 has a half life of 100 years and gives off electrons only!! No neutrons and no harmful radiation such as gamma. Its "waste" is Copper 63 which is a stable isotope of copper and actually the most abundant. Hopefully at some point a scientist will think out of the box and try to put an end to this insane heavy element rubbish.
He skipped over the most important part: All real attempts to do reprocessing ended in environmental disasters because chemical processes are not 100% clean.
Thank you so much for highlighting the isotopes of Pu.
This is often ommitted by folks scaring people with fear of reprocessing used PWR fuel.
I am learning so much from these videos. If college classes are like this, I don’t know how anyone would hate going to lecture.
In my experience, they're not. My university lecturers were far less interesting, coherent, and engaging than this guy is.
@@ErwinPommel dude i wonder how much people pay to be teached by this dude
I see this kind of comment all the time, but it doesn't make sense. Just learning a basic overview is always fun and easy to package in a nice, entertaining way.
But you go to university to learn the details, get down and dirty with the math and all the other components of what you learn.
No matter how hard you try, making differential equations fun is impossible. It's not something you can nearly package and communicate like this content is.
@@skylarkesselring6075 Diffy Q's can be fun. It just takes a good instructor and the right mindset in the student. But there are many instructors that can make it tiresome.
If you enjoy solving logical puzzles, are able to keep up with the homework and don't hesitate to seek help when you don't, you should be good. It helps to recognize elegance and mathematical beauty when you see it as it adds to your enjoyment, also it helps when you come to see you are learning a language of a sort, a language that best describes how our universe functions.
@@ErwinPommel
Charles Forsberg is an MIT Nuclear Department professor. He teaches fuel cycle, iirc. He is very animated compared to most professors. He speaks at a LOT of conferences, and takes his PhD students to speak, and does a great job supporting them.supports them.
There is a new reactor type that does not require complex expensive reprocessing, only conversion from oxide to chloride, no separations. That reduces cost 10x vs the IFR method, and reduces proliferation concerns more than the IFR pyro-processing. These are Molten Chloride Salt Fast Reactors they eliminate cladding absorptions, but can't get the Fissile density of solid fuel.
GO MSR!
I studied mechanical engineering in university, and I even took nuclear energy engineering modules, and I hated it! If only I had a professor like this one who is genuinely engaging
Discovering this channel today has been the best thing that has happened to my 2020 yet lol thnx so much for such good content
Loving this channel, just found it today and im binge watching all of the nuclear power content.
3:42 - I never realize this ... it is much easier to separate out plutonium from uranium, different elements, than it is refine different isotopes of uranium. I guess that should be obvious, but it never occurred to me. I learned something.
Love this professor he has become my favorite guy to listen to- brilliant and passionate
thank god the YT algorithm finally threw me this. this has been up there with Sapolsky's neuro series. Super well delivered mini lectures. Thank you
Ive just taken two nuclear chem courses, one radiopharmaceutical chem course and a solvent extraction course and this series is such an amazing recap of all ive learned this last half year! Awesome vids, your vids will help a lot of students...and hopefully just curious people as well!
I reckon you're right handed. Professor will yku make a video on Thorium liquid salt reactors please? Norway and Indonesia are experimenting with them. Kirk Sorensen is a good source of information.
Helps solve waste problem making nuclear energy even more 'greener' Definitely the right way to go. India has designed this type of reactor. It should come on line shortly.
If I was still in school I would definitely sign up for your classes. Thank you for educating us.
I love your videos, I only just came across your channel this afternoon and I've been watching nonstop.
Dear Professor. I have learned so much from you this year and I’m deeply grateful. By way of repayment, I would advise you to consult with any competent sound engineer to improve the audio in your wonderful videos. They so deserve it!
You should probably check your speakers. The audio seems fine on my system.
Cd is NOT like a control rod. Pyro-processing has no moderator and Cd is only for
Lithium is bomb fuel, whether or not it's Lithium- 6 or Lithium-7. It's used to build hydrogen bombs. How could it serve as a control rod when it readily takes part in nuclear reactions?
@@taraswertelecki9886 Fusion, not fission. Lithium can be used in fusion. I mean, technically carbon can also undergo fusion, what's the point here exactly?
have you heard of the MCSFR? it's a fast spectrum molten salt reactor that doesn't require ANY fuel fabrication or reprocessing. it's just a vat of chloride salts that fission for 40 years, eventually getting batch-processed once (just removal of fission products, not even separating the actinides) and split into two reactors
how do you get the fuel without fabrication into chloride salts then... as well as the better question: how do you force the fission products AND higher order products to bind only with the chloride process instead of the housing, components, sensors, pumping system and wherever else they are when they occur? Because it doesn't occur ONLY in the "perfect little box" and Hopey McWishy doesn't stop bad byproducts like inert gasses from screwing everything up.
@@prjndigo nevermind toxic argon poisoning
I work on molten-salt reprocessing, and I can tell you that it's only possible to remove about 40% of the fission products without removing the actinides, at least by any chemical method currently known to humanity. Rb, Cs, Y, Ba, Sr, and all the lanthanides REQUIRE proir actinide removal to be separated from salts.
@@richardfitzhugh6628 What's your opinion about dual fluid reactors?
th-cam.com/video/Zy6zCgftVPY/w-d-xo.html
@@richardfitzhugh6628 Correct, and we WANT to keep the Cs and Sr with the actinides to prevent saltbfreezing casualty easier, and reduce the melting point of the eutectic with CsCl
Please have a look at the work done at Moltex Energy.
Caesium and Iodine become salts within the fuel. Gasses escape from the fuel pins do have minimal poisoning effect. There is no water in the core so neutrons cannot crack it into hydrogen and oxygen.
It runs in the fast spectrum - no moderator but more importantly it burns the actinides so the used fuel has an active life of 300 years. The fuel is molten salt, but they coolant is also the same variety of molten salt (though no actual fuel of course). Heat is moved by convection to a tertiary salt which raises steam. It’s a burner fast reactor but there are no pumps on the core and no risky elements like sodium.
I'm about to watch all these videos
excellent. Would you happen to have some more chemistry details on the fuel reprocessing? Chemically it's a jumble of atoms and ions. Still any serious effort to combat climat change will have to include around 5000 1500 MW breeder reactors plus the thermal ones that feed plutonium into the breeders. we simply have no other choice.
We have a choice. De-growth. Infinite growth and consumption on a finite planet is unsustainable. There aren't unlimited resources and the ecosystem is already in BIG trouble. The future of most of our species is on very shaky ground.
@Tom R Believe what you want. I'm tired of debating.
Search for dual fluid reactor, it is 80 times more efficient than normal light water reactors.
@@markgigiel2722 Over the past 20 years the population growth rate has been decreasing, and mathematical models show our growth rate will begin to hit the negative relatively soon. Next, nuclear energy is not the end all be all, but it's the best option we have right now with the increased CO2 emissions influencing climate change. Once we can stabilize that issue, it will give us more time to develop resources towards effective energy storage tech, that does not require large amounts of rare-earth metals, finally enabling practical use of solar and wind, which feed off the energy of the sun. If you argue the sun is not a finite source of energy... well everyone has known that the sun is going to burn out eventually, but that should be humanity's target right now, live as long as the sun lives.
I'm also aware that the energy crisis is not the only issue right now. Heck, farming and agriculture are being wasteful and destructive of resources alone. Lookup phosphorus depletion. A lot of this is due to bad practices over using nutrients in fields, having the nutrients bleed into waterways/ocean, killing off marine life, which is a big portion of the phosphorus resource (fish mill). But there is a lot of research going into resolving this issue due to toxic algal bloom infesting many coastal inlets of first world countries. A lot of research is going into alga farming because of this. A classic example of "If god gives you lemons, make lemonade."
Keep your hopes up, there is a lot of work going into finding solutions. Some of which are right in front of you, being professors sharing their knowledge on a free open platform like youtube ;D
@@TickyTack23 I think we already crossed the Rubicon. We are so far into overshoot on every front that it's just a matter of time until complete collapse and possible extinction. Have a nice day. I've been following the trends since I was a kid and I'm 61 now. You won't change my opinion.
Why is he not talking about the Kovarex enrichment process?
because hes using mods
very interesting way of showing everything on glass
This guy really knows what he talking about.
Excellent presentation on an important existential threat to life. Breeder reactor consumption of high level waste seems the most practical way of securing the long term safety of the planet. Great job in the presentation. My concern is the current production of spent fuel rods from LWR reactors around the world are being inventoried to vaults. Perfectly safe in a technological age and ready for re-processing. The problem is the large inventory of trans-uranic elements in these vaults if civilization devolves without reducing this inventory. The vaults will eventually fail and given the long half-lives of some of these materials, serious contamination to water tables and the environment is possible in thousands of years. Reducing the standing inventory provides long term safety to life.
As a counterpoint, consider this video from the same professor, about the natural nuclear reactor in Oklo, Gabon: th-cam.com/video/pMjXAAxgR-M/w-d-xo.html
Towards the end, he explains that the geology of the site is just about a worst-case scenario for migration of the products of fission, and yet they're all still there.
Muon-catalysed reactions are interesting, a Muon-reactor could reduce half-lifes significantly. The question is, will anyone build a reactor to power a muon reactor? We could start reprocessing some waste.
There is a problem with Muons though, the energy made to create them currently outweighs the benefits you gain from them, not just for reducing waste but also making more efficient fission and later on fusion reactors. Unless we can make Muons with less energy and more yield per energy, that plan will be shelved until more effiicient reactors can breed them.
You are an excellent teacher. It's unrelated, but I like your clear-board setup. You must be pretty good at writing backwards (assuming that's not digitally produced).
Is there a video including talk on thorium as a reactor on this channel?
What happens to the cadmium after it absorbs neutrons? Does it become a radioactive isotope of cadmium? Does it fission into stable elements?
prof thanks you for these amazing videos
Does Somebody knows more about the concept of a traveling wave reactor?
A good book on the IFR is
"PLENTIFUL ENERGY" by Carles Till and Yoon IL Chang
Why should we use sodium as a coolant? It catches fire when exposed to air and explodes on contact with water.
As far as I can see the molten chloride salt fast reactor uses pretty much the same mechanism as the IFR but seems to be much much safer to operate.
Indeed. Theres also the lead cooled FBR which is an even better «breeder» . But the cool thing about the MCSFR tech is the processing of fuel and waste. Nuclear waste from water reactors comes in, fission products come out. You just turn the transuranics, plutonium and the uraniums into chloride salts and throw them into the reactor. Much simpler than fabricating fuel rods.
The problem with MSRs in general is corrosion.
Is it possible to use centrifuges to enrich uranium and plutonium from the fission products entirely powered by nuclear power plants? I imagine that transmutations requires lots of energy that can be reached with nuclear power plants.
IFR never had any in reactor building pyro-processing. GE PRISM is the commercialized version of IFR, and there is no plans for the pyro-processing to occur in the reactor containment.
It could though, or be processed in an adjacent containment vessel of its own.
I have a question: once uranium is enriched, can it be unenriched back to U238? I ask because I’m curious if all the highly enriched uranium in all the bombs that exist in the world can be turned back into 3-4% reactor fuel.
Its called downblending. And the US is thinking about using some of its Uranium bombs to make 20% U235 reactor aka HALEU fuel for the demonstration Natrium reactors in Wyoming (the Natrium is a breeder designed to «breed and burn»no reprocessing needed). Then you can give it U238.
Ya say that nobody would have an issue with digging something radioactive up then putting it back at the same radiation level, but we don't mine heavy rare earths in the united states due to Thorium contamination, which if you mixed it with a small amount of dirt you could put the Thorium back into the ground at the same concentration.
3:40 Actually only the bomb dropped in Hiroshima was made of U235. The bomb dropped in Nagasaki was made of Pu239 so they figured it before they had any bomb. They just did not know if the implosion used in a Pu239 bomb worked. That is why they used one of the three plutonium bombs they had in a test explosion.
Well said....
My mother said bol-pen referring to a dry-ink-pen. On the other hand, it is actually a bold-point pen.
pen = ka-lam = pen-sil
pen = qalam (Ar)
pen-sil = mirsamun (Ar)
I was wondering about plutonium, since a previous video said that plutonium needed isotope separation.
Troy Schofield Isotopic seperation is needed to produce weapons grade Plutonium from spend fuel, reactors however, can operate using Plutonium from spent fuel
I have found two things in the public domain that somewhat refute the professor in tiny details. 1. He says reactor grade plutonium cannot be made to use for a weapon. Our geniuses have in fact detonated reactor grade in a weapon. Any time you get criticality and go onto chain fission he knows you can then use the xray flux to promote deuterium hybrid to also go critical in the thermal. Much easier to make deuterium than separate isotopes as we know and you don't even need lithium 7 that we found to our dismay in the south pacific. More later.
> He says reactor grade plutonium cannot be made to use for a weapon.
Where did he say that?
No need to reprocess. chop up the fuel pellets and chuck them into the Elysium Industries molten chloride fast breeder reactor. Done, fuel as a profit center.
do you still have to do isotopic separation of the Pu mix to re use it in a reactor or is the isotope mix only poor to make weapons with?
It's ok in a reactor. The problem for making bombs is the Pu-240, it sometimes spontaneously fissions and releases neutrons. This is a problem because it tends to make the chain reaction start too soon when the bomb is detonated. The bomb still explodes but with much less energy. Pu-240 also emits gamma rays as it decays which makes handling the warhead a lot more dangerous.
@@nerd1000ify thx
The US Russia Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement as amended in 2010 (ipfmlibrary.org/PMDA2010.pdf) says non-weapons grade Plutonium is Pu with
Can you add the thorium ore radioactivity horizontal lines on the beginning decay curve? Thorium ore is natural and more radioactively radio-hazardous than U ore.
The LWRwaste might be under the Th ore line at 1000 years.
Thorium ore is commonly left piled in the open as waste during mining and milling operations for other materials. Not all that hazardous. Power plant waste using thorium fuel varies depending on the type of plant of course but tends to be composed of a material mix that as a whole decays to ore equivalent level in a shorter period of time than typical uranium fuel.
David “Not drawn to scale” Ruzic.
So, any idea if the regulations on beta testing new nuclear power plants have been lifted or made better in the past few years?
Let me make sure I get this right: the best we can (theoretically, because in many cases this is not even being done yet) do is high level radioactive waste that needs to be kept safe for 500 years.
For comparison, check the life expectancies of the frame conditions necessary: steel concrete: 100+yrs, written records: 200+yrs, stable political systems: 50-250yrs, periods without war: 50-150yrs. Do you feel lucky?
Google Deep Isolation Mueller
Is he writing backwards, that we can read his script from a frontal perspective? Or is the film being replayed flip-side and he is right handed?
I think he's writing on a sheet of glass, the camera is recording it through the glass backwards and then in post-processing they're flipping it on a vertical axis to get writing that goes forwards from our perspective.
what about uranium laser inritchment?
They told me 30 years ago, that they will do laser enrichment soon. Now, 30 years later they still don't have a industrial working solution to separate isotopes with Lasers.
@@OpenGL4ever www.silex.com.au/SILEX-Laser-Uranium-Enrichment-Technology
@@OpenGL4ever google SILEX Laser Uranium Enrichment Technology
@@shawnnoyes4620 I know that all, it was already known in the 90 that's why i was talking about. But it's still NOT used for hundreds of tons of nuclear waste. Which means that it's still not working in an industrial manner thus we can put that on the side.
@@OpenGL4ever (1) It will probably be used for Paducah, Kentucky tailings at some point, then it can go from engineering to industrial scale. (2) If it is proved out there, then you could use as part of the Fluoride volatility reprocessing for SNF (e.g., google Progress in development of Fluoride volatility reprocessing technology Jan Uhlíř). (3) So, I would say do not put it aside ... (4) I get it would only really be good for the first step of the Fluoride volatility processing of Uranium 235 & Uranium 238 enrichment. Though, it would be interesting for separating out U233 and dovetail with Uranium 232 to aid in non-proliferation. (5) I am assuming that the U/Pu step (next) you could put in a Denatured MSR or Molten Chloride Salt Fast Reactor.
The US had the Hartford facility in Washington state to process Plutonium, and it was a large and costly effort. Not simple or easy.
PUREX process
There is Nuclear Fuel Services Inc. in Erwin,TN that reprocesses warheads into reactor fuel for the Navy.
Hanford?
How much heat is produced by
fission of a single uranium atom in Celsius?
Celsius is a unit of temperature not heat.
Also you'd have to quantify the amount of mass it's heating up, what the mass is, etc. I think a better question is how much energy is given off by a single fission. It's not a lot, considering how small atoms are. I mean heck, PET scans literally induce matter/antimatter annihilation inside our own bodies. But since the mass is so small, we're fine.
Bottom line: you sound young. Ask a teacher
to have heat you must have a medium. The sun's rays are not hot, but when they get to earth, they go through the air, which is the medium. The medium is getting warm, not the rays. When the rays hit your skin, your skin becomes the medium. The rays interact with your atoms, the atoms heat up, and you feel warm, but the rays do not actually carry heat, just energy. The Dr. gave you the amount of volts it gives off. That energy flies in all directions, but it sounds like some gets trapped in the fragments of the broken atom.
you cannot measure heat with a single atom ... I think you mean electron volts or joules
Dumb question here. If we use water as a moderator to catalyze the reaction within the reactor, why do we store used fuel rods next to each other while submerged in water?
Water absorbs radiation very efficiently and has very high thermal capacity.
Thanks for the answer! If I can ask a follow up, how is it absorbed? Is that how we make deuterium and tritium?(I know we can get them from sea water, but can we synthesize it in any usable capacity) Does the water absorb the neutrons that way or is there another mechanism that is at play?
@@ktinsley4579 After leaving a reactor fuel emits practically no neutrons. Surrounding the fuel with MASS (in the form of water) shields from gamma radiation. And the water is a great coolant. The fuel rods are not closely packed and the water may be "poisoned" so criticality is avoided and moderation is unimportant.
@@PMA65537
Thanks for the response.
Intregal is that even a word? I think he means Integral Fast Reactor, IFR.
Do I really need to know? No. Do I really need to watch? Yes.
Pu separation is not easier than U enrichment. Pu makes a smaller more powerful bomb.
Separating two different elements by chemical means is much easier and cheaper than separating two different isotopes from the same element.
Simple example:
Water is a molecule consisting of one atom hydrogen and 2 atoms oxygen. If i want to separate them, i only need electrical power and do a little electrolysis.
Separating Deuterium from Protium, which are both hydrogen, is much more difficult and energy consuming.
Also keep in mind. When the built the first to nuclear bombs, they gone the difficult way of creating an implosion bomb design. The reason why they do this was, because getting enough Uranium 235 for a gun design bomb was very energy and time consuming and in 1945, they had only enough Uranium 235 for just one bomb. It would have taken another year to make another one.
But with the implosion design, which uses plutonium 239 and not uranium 235. They could create much more plutonium 239 in a breeder reactor, than they could enrich uranium 235. Thus to make a lot of bombs, the Plutonium 235 and implosion design was the way to go.
Let's just dwell for a bit on that "curve of nuclear development did not continue...".
I think we identified the issue here.
I wish we have the will to make IFR the standard so we don't have a waste problem
this dude should become president
i just figured out how these videos are made. blew my own mind.
@@flashers.5212 He writes normally on a glass pane and then in editing mirrors the video to reverse the writing and make it legible to the viewer. Makes it look like he's writing backwards.
Siggy in CR 🇬🇧 thank you.
@@flashers.5212 apologies for being late.😉
Klaus Gartenstiel 😉🇬🇧 no worries.
Yea, some time ago I was thinking he is a really good backwards-writer, but if you look close....there are a few obvious clues that these guys are mirror-reversing the resulting video. No big deal....I'm like a sponge, soaking up the content as fast as it comes out (adding my own thought and research to the end result in my head). I don't even notice his writing anymore.
Dump the used fuel into molten salt reactors?
MSR are useless jokes and only valid in an exceptionally small and thus inefficient scale.
@@prjndigo What a useful argument. Please, tell me more and, if you can, support your claims with evidence.
@@prjndigo were waiting.
Dump the used fuel into dual fluid reactors. They are not the same as molten salt reactors.
@@prjndigo Perhaps you are the useless joke that does not know what they are talking about
👍👍👏
France still has waste, both fission products and burned MOX fuel that is planned to be buried, like burned U, is planned in the US and Finland. Burned MIX is the same as LWR waste. Yes the waste volume is less/MWe, but only by about 12%.
dont know how i got here, dont understand a lot of what he is saying but its interesting
Writing backwards like a boss.
Может видео конечно мтароеч но БН-800 и БН-600 уже лет 30-40 работали и работают
I didn't know Donald Trump was good at nuclear physics
This guy totally give Neelix vibes from Star Trek Voyager.
Phlox
🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
This man has a PhD in writing backwards.
The video is flipped and he's right handed. ;)
@@bronzedivision the video isn't flipped, there's no math transformation you could apply to make this, he's really badass.
The only way you can get this perspective are either curved mirrors or writing backwards, no other explanation and the dude's teaching nuclear physics so i don't think he's the kind of guy that takes stuff easy, how is that improbable? If i get a suspect of a crime that was a teacher writing backwards on glass i'd definetly go after physicists.
Modern digital technology. This is z great benefit, but the wrong needs better visibility.
All of You guys above are wrong. He is standing in front of the camera and has a transparent plexiglass "blackboard" between him and the camera. He actually writes normally not backwards. No digital mambo-jambo required just simple geometry :) Simple proof: stand in front of the mirror and "write" something in the air. You will notice that the direction of letters in the mirror is the same as if You were writing them on a sheet of paper. The image You see in the mirror is exactly what You see when You watch a recording made by camera. Add the transparent blackboard to the mix and there You have it. Try it out at home - it works ;p
I think MSRs will be a LOT more practical than the reactor shown.
Why would anybody use Sodium in a reactor? It is highly reactive with water.
Because sodium is far better than water, if the water goes away or boils.
I love his videos but that godforsaken marker hurts my brain to the point I just can't watch them anymore without losing my mind
Well....The Snookman is correct....looks like a dust particle...LOL :-)
"castles in Europe make 500 years" only the ones that survived 500+ years (survivorship bias)
Statement that power reactor Pu will not make a bomb is FALSE.
USA fired a weapon in 1962 at the NV test area made with approx. 22% Pu 240 extracted from fuel used in a British reactor. It had about 10kt yield.
Repeated statements are on record by USA weapons developers that it is not impossible, just harder to engineer into a small package (more heat is produced by some of the other Pu isotopes, especially Pu238) and more dangerous for anyone working around it due to higher emmissions.
What was the bomb's and nuclear test's name?
@@OpenGL4ever
The US government STILL HAS NOT DECLASSIFIED THIS. The historical truth runs contrary to the politically required public perception of this issue. Witness the professor here, who 50+ years after the event still took the official version as being fact?
My Info on what happened has been pieced together from several sources.
Look here for what was officially released during the Carter administration:
www.osti.gov/opennet/forms?formurl=document/press/pc29.html
Note that everything from the total yield to the NAME of the test is still classified? Why would that be, if it supported the official line, that reactor grade Pu is useless for weapons production? And why did Jimmy Carter PERSONALLY feel in necessary to put out the tiny bit of information we are given, the mere fact that the test had occurred and not been a fizzle?
Got to love at least one aspect of Jimmy Carter, he had a Sunday school teacher level of compulsive truth telling AND was a military officer with a degree in nuclear engineering, fi ally granted presidential level of clearance. A good man, but a badly handicapped politician thereby.
Separately, one may finds information that British dual use reactor (power AND weapons Pu generation) reprocessed fuel was used because USA officially doesn't reprocess power reactor fuel AND that Hanford weapons Pu production facilities FAILED to create the requested 20% + Pu240, since the cans of fuel would swell, jam and burst in the channels when subjected to the longer than designed for dwell time. The Hanford reactors managed to produce only a small ammount of approx. 15% Pu 240, about 10 kilos, and 1.5 kilos of 20% from a high energy materials testing reactor, which was promptly requisitioned away by another, still undisclosed part of the USA nuclear establishment as being earmarked for them via a "prior request" of theirs! One wonders who had more pull than the bomb boys in 1962?!
More as I go back to original sources, I went down this rabbit hole a while back and did not save all the links I should have.
Google will pull up a large part of this piecemeal if you just LOOK. Then, look for what various knowledgable physicists and engineers have come to believe about the matter from the public domain information and WHY.
Then apply Clarke's first law:
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”
www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/787/can-reactor-grade-plutonium-be-used-nuclear-weapons
@@Bert2368 Thank you very much for your extensive information.
A power reactor produces Pu239 along with Pu240 and some of its heavier isotopes. Only the former is good for making weapons; with a low plutonium yield and 2/3 of that being unusable isotopes, power reactors are poor at producing plutonium for weapons manufacture.
@@Akira-wh9mw
Please, do not discount the production of Pu 238! That's a source of difficulty as well, beyond the Pu 240 & heavier isotopes...
Perhaps you should read the links I provided, then go back and watch the video where the poor professor states unequivocably that you CAN NOT use high burnup power reactor Pu for a weapon AT ALL. Which is false, as had been shown by a live weapon test using a high burnup power reactor fuel sourced Pu isotope mixture in USA back in 1962.
I do not dispute that a first level nuclear weapons state such as USA, Russian Federation, UK, France, China or Israel would PREFER to use "weapons grade" Pu composed of 93% or better Pu 239. But ANY power reactor or weapons production isotope sourced Pu isotope mix (short of 80% Pu238) CAN be weaponized, as admitted by IAEC.
the first bomb was actually a plutonium bomb :)
Just 500 years of waste deposit. Not great, not terrible. I rate this a 3.6.
Unobtainium has a very short half life
Dude, I came up with the exact same solution as you’re suggesting and I dropped out of college. The people making the big decisions should not be.
If one is ok with a lower yield and a need for a little extra shielding around the core, it's perfectly possible, and even not terribly difficult, to make a nuclear weapon with the mix of plutonium that comes out of LWRs (it's also called "reactor-grade plutonium"). There are very clear statements by weapons designers on this point, and one can find enough material from a simple google search for "nuclear weapons from reactor grade plutonium" that it's not necessary to provide sources here.
On the other hand, the thorium fuel cycle eventually produces plutonium 238, which actually CAN'T be used in nuclear weapons (though its precursor, neptunium, definitely can).
If anything, I'd assume that it'd be easiest to make a bomb out of uranium-233 however impractical that would be.
Please reference where any nation state has made a nuclear bomb out of reactor-grade plutonium. They would simply leverage a graphite reactor and pull fuel out early and process via PUREX to get pure PU239. This is nonsense.
@@adamdanilowicz4252 U233 makes as good a weapon as weapons grade Pu239, but can use an easier gun type weapon as well. U233 is easily obtained separate from even U232.
I love nuclear power.
Read up on French sodium reactor problems (Super Phoenix) and dealing with those ! No thanks! They went pressurized water.
Dear David, could you post some links on why (Super) Phoenix failed ?
@@paulspyckerelle703 Sodium burns when exposed to air. Radioactive sodium releases it into the ambient atmosphere. Severe thermal stress problems occurred caused by cyclical thermal fluid flow in piping. large.stanford.edu/courses/2011/ph241/abdul-kafi1/
LOL, is he writing this all on a glass window backwards? Wow! If he is writing on a mirror ... where is the camera?
4:51
Uhh... "No bomb" does not equal Pu? TWO NEGATIVES EQUAL A POSITIVE! It's a conspiracy! DUN DUN
Huh? What are you saying friend?
Lol thought the same the moment he wrote it : P
The question is ... what the heck is Iran doing?
0:56 "clearly no one is going to object..." that is very naive thinking. anti nuclear activists can't be reasoned with. this is not exaggeration.
Yeah, true, but can you blame them. The whole stupid screwups from the world's nuclear engineers has been dreadful.
When you expect some comprehensive details on reprpocessing & waste issue but half of the video is wasted on beside question on weaponizing plutonium.
Thats just peoples fixation when it comes to any discussion of nuclear power, better to have it now than derail the entire comments.
What you need to do is step away from heavy elements and go to Nickel 63. It is a pure beta emitter and a metal, with a half life of 100 years. This way you can have safe nuclear energy and no nuclear proliferation. The breeders for Ni63 can be made to work on heavy hydrogen (Deuterium) in plasma state where you can produce Tritium and free neutrons. With Nickel 63 you cannot have it go critical (no fission and no neutron radiation).
Nickel 63 is not fissionable. How do you want make energy with Nickel 63?
You might use the Tritum for nuclear fusion, but there is still a long way to go for nuclear fusion reactors. In about 15 years we will know more.
@@OpenGL4ever Nickel 63 is a radioactive BETA emitter. It only gives off ELECRONS, which means you can harvest them DIRECTLY and not through thermo-nuclear conversion that we use nowadays. I agree with you however that we are decades away from this as, conveniently, almost no-one talks about this. It seems they like their fission byproducts polluting this world.
@@DBuilder1977 Nickel 63 has a half-life of around 100 years. To make energy of radioactive decay at that low decay rate for energy production you will need a lot of Nickel 63 isotopes concentrated at the same place. And to separate them from other Nickel isotopes, especially the ones, that are not radioactive, you will need a lot of energy. Thus in theory you might use the electrons, but in practice this is not feasible.
It's even very likely that your separation process will require more energy than you can gain by the radioactive decay.
If it were that simple, we would use radioactive waste to generate electricity directly, but except for radioisotope generators this is usually not done.
In nuclear waste there are more than enough isotopes that do a beta decay too. And some of them do decay a lot faster, thus, the power of beta emission is much higher.
@@OpenGL4ever Well, Plutonium has a half life of 400 years, which is 4 times weaker than Nickel 63 so your argument doesn't hold, Nickel 63 is 4 times stronger than Pu!!! Also, to separate the isotopes, you needs JUST a centrifuge so where is the "a lot of energy" needed? The reason they don't use it still is that you cannot get a bomb out of it.
@@DBuilder1977 Take a look at the decay products of nuclear waste. Some are in the range of seconds, minutes and hours.
A centrifuge doesn't run without energy and they consume a lot of energy.
Take a look at this video, it clearly shows the costs of isotope separation:
th-cam.com/video/CodBk7xewRk/w-d-xo.html
Any new reactor has to compete with 2 cents/kwh wind and solar, and can't. I'm interested in what we are actually doing with the spent fuel, and what we should do with it. I expect companies that shut down an old reactor will want to unload them, and avoid spending any money on them, and taxpayers will get stuck with the bill. My favorite solution so far is Yucca moutain, because it requires the least amount of effort long term.
Wind and solar add 2 cents/kwh to some other reliable electricity, usually the inefficient type of natural gas plant. The spent fuel rods still have 98% of their energy left in them and will be used in the new types of reactors in the licensing phase right now.
@@chapter4travels Is that the story you tell yourself to make yourself feel like you are right? It's true that variable renewabled are a PIA for old school baseload generators that are not designed to follow load. Now if you only had one solar pannel, or one turbine, in one spot with no grid connecting them, no storage, no ability to charge your car when electricity is cheap. Basically it's only like that in the minds of nuclear proponents, cause when all you want to use is a hammer, every screw looks like a stupid nail.
@@fjalics Well it's like that all over the world, renewables need a 100% demand sized reliable electricity source backup. You might find an exception in the most ideal place on the globe but this is the rare exception, not the rule. There is no battery technology that can be used everywhere, and if there was, it would wreck what little economics they have.energycentral.com/c/ec/catch-22-energy-storage
@@chapter4travels That's false, and not even the right question. When was the last time the wind stopped blowing in all of North America? Oh right, never. If you have 24 hours of storage, and enough solar to cover your lowest day, you can do it. www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2020/
But enough theory, how about practice? Iowa produces 42% of their electricity with wind. Do tell all the terrible repercussions of adding all that wind power, with links.
@@fjalics Ever heard of line loss? The biggest problem Germany has is transmission line access, every country will have that problem. Germany is the perfect example of what not to do. Also, electricity only represents about 25% of total energy demand, what will cover the rest? Nuclear has none of those problems, only ignorance and political problems.
If you seal a nuclear reactor, close all valves, bulkheads and such while running at full power, cut off any water supply, said reactor becomes a bomb. Not a very effective/powerful bomb, but still one capable of flattening the power plant where it was running. Don't forget the nuclear materials ejected into the surrounding areas.
Depends on the reactor but most would just automatically SCRAM in that situation, shutting down and adding coolant. If cooling is insufficient and all emergency backups were to fail, then the nuclear material would likely melt and collect at the bottom of the containment vessel. If the plant is of a very old design type that lacks some of these safety features, then it would likely melt straight down to collect on the foundation of the building or in the worst case into the ground underneath. The main potential causes of an explosion would be excessive steam pressure or hydrogen gas buildup, in modern designs they would release this pressure at planned points while keeping the containment vessel intact and little or no radioactive material is likely to escape with it.
@@stupidburp Moreover, EBR-II was tested with a circulation failure event. Thermal expansion changed the geometry og the core so it became subcritical.
Don't make it in the first place...
We could debate over this ? Or Just agree that earth has become one big toilet and we are trashing it with every passing decade.. I believe there's no turning back .. Global warming is a fact !! And most scientists believe we are pushing to the point of no return!!! You do make a good valid point ...
Matt, you are incredibly smart and you should be a teacher!!
@Matt S I'm more irritated about the fact he just left and deleted the evidence. Arguing about this sort of thing is kinda fun, to be honest. Still, that guy was noting compared to someone like BeatifulGirlByDana (who is, in fact, an old man who makes crude sharpie drawings of radiation trefoils while saying dumb shit like "if I had a dixie cup of yellowcake I would die within 10 seconds", "Fukushima caused a hurricane" and, perhaps my favourite, "California is a radioactive wasteland, how can it not be a wasteland" (I'm paraphrasing, I honestly cannot stand to listen to him for more than a minute before I suffer brain damage))
Also, I don't mind solar too much, it's just some people see it as a silver bullet to climate change when it's a part of solving part of the climate crisis. Putting wind and solar in
Nuclear Power Plant exclusion zones isn't a horrible idea(though cooling towers could be of issue for wind turbines and they could block light for solar panels, both simply due to the size of the cooling towers seen at many power plants, particularly in the US where around the time most nuclear power plants were built there were rules from the EPA that required cooling towers).
They have been hiding safe nuclear energy for some while now because they need the Plutonium for their bombs. There are many ways to get energy from nuclear radiation. The best is a direct conversion to electricity by beta decay. Only the lighter elements undergo beta decay so the trick is using light elements. Two pure beta emitters exist: Tritium and Nickel 63. The former is a gas and is hard to contain whereas the latter is a metal. Nickel 63 has a half life of 100 years and gives off electrons only!! No neutrons and no harmful radiation such as gamma. Its "waste" is Copper 63 which is a stable isotope of copper and actually the most abundant. Hopefully at some point a scientist will think out of the box and try to put an end to this insane heavy element rubbish.
@Matt S You Don't Know Shit 1800 Nuclear Isotopes Vent & Leak There's Your Cancer
He skipped over the most important part:
All real attempts to do reprocessing ended in environmental disasters because chemical processes are not 100% clean.