@@Markle2k Should run an experiment where I take the audio of just those two words and present it to people without preamble and then record their reactions with out prompting them with any specific questions.
Great series Scott!! I have been studying Nuclear weapons, Delivery Systems and Nuclear strategy for 45 years. I served 10 years in the US Army and was trained for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological warfare during my service. Your videos provide straight forward information that an average "Joe" can understand. I enjoyed watching them and have learned from them as well. Keep up the great work!! Cheers Mate!
I just watched the whole series in a single row. One of the best and most informative I ever had. Can't wait to start my own production! Seems easier than brewing beer.
So your saying if one day I wake up with a mushroom cloud growing on the opposite end of the valley, I'll know at least it was Cody'sLab at his ranch messing with plutonium? :P
Those early plutonium reactors remind me of the Windscale reactor. The British air cooled nuclear reactor meant to create plutonium for nuclear bombs. In typical British fashion, it didn't work right the first time, so by hand, they cut the cooling fins on the hundreds of thousands of fuel bundles down by a centimeter or so until it got hot enough to work properly. Later, they caught it on fire for 3 full days before someone realized that hey, maybe having all the cooling fans on full blast is making this fire harder to put out, rather than easier...
@@eberlined The series started at just the right time for me, we were doing some rudimentary nuclear physics in school and I was craving more and this was perfect. I think I'll do a video of my own soon about RTGs, I just need to teach myself how thermocouples work before I can do that.
Toured Oak Ridge during my undergraduate, saw that exact breeder reactor from a few feet away, one of the coolest places I have ever been to and the only place I have ever been to with armed guards to welcome you at the main gate. Love the series.
@@keitha.9788 good point Keith! I get greeted by armed guards every time I show up at one of my customers gated residence. almost like entering the Baghdad Green Zone. They check and take a photo my ID, and require me to open my work van for search. Thats the length certain celebrities go through in 2022.
Your vids are some of the best I have ever seen about nuclear weapons. I used to watch you back in the days when your vids were that rocket simulation stuff and that doesn't interest me much, but I have just found this series that you made. Unbelievable that these never came into my feed before now, but yeah it is what it is, I'm very glad I found them now. Hope you are doing okay mate. After I watch this gonna check your channel and see what you have been up to lately. Thanks for all the time you spent on these vids I am really enjoying them. Most YT vids on this subject are very basic, a little dumbed-down but these are packed with information I did not previously know. Cheers mate, appreciate your hard work.
I have students in my materials engineering courses who are skeptical about what kind of design applications phase changes affect and I just love getting more examples. Nuclear weapons is a field that always gets attention!
Unlike Neptunium-239 which is relatively unstable and undergoes rapid beta-decay, Plutonium-239 is relatively stable and undergoes slow alpha-decay. Your analogy does not hold.
Just found this series. In 2001, I was riding my motorcycle across the county and came across the EBR-1 in Idaho. The day visited, some of the machinists and an engineer that worked there back in the day were visiting and really made my tour of the facility much, much better.
Just wanted to add in. Anti-proliferation efforts include REQUIRING the 'toasting' of fuel in light-water reactors for a minimum amount of time to ensure the plutonium get sufficiently poisoned with Pu240 and Pu241. This works fairly well, as it's kind of hard for a country to take a 1GWe reactor offline without anyone noticing. As for being able to use it for a bomb, technically you can get plutonium like this to fission despite the Pu241 poisoning, but the Pu240 makes it very likley to pre-detonate or hamstring the yield with a pre-detonation, as you alluded to a year ago in this series. As for separating out the different isotopes, you technically could do it, but no one really has on an industrial level. It's ridiculously inefficient, because instead of separating out essentially inert U238 from U235, with a 1.3% mass difference, you're trying to separate out radioactive Pu239 from Pu240 with a mass difference of 0.4% Which gaseous compound you make from the material to separated it can alter how different these mass-differences end up being, but you're still stuck with having contaminated centrigues that require shielding and become very difficult to service and potentially need to be operating remotely. And this is ignoring all the chemistry-based shenanigans plutonium gets up to which you covered nicely in this video. The extra cost and difficulty and risk just isn't worth it. It's possible, but enriching Uranium secretly is much easier, which is why no one goes this route. Anti-proliferation doesn't mean making stuff impossible. It just means not making things any easier than natural alternatives. In the case of reactor fuel, as long as proper toasting is enforced, plutonium's proliferation potential is essentially done away with because no one will bother.
It must be a bit more difficult to enforce this minimum fuel residence requirement for designs like CANDU that provide for online refueling, without ever having to shut the reactor down. Does any non nuclear-weapon state operate a CANDU or similar? I think I remember reading that India purchased one many years ago, then built their own version of it, but of course they're already a member of the "club".
@@jordanhazen7761 Um, your question is answered just by remembering what CANDU stands for: Canadian Deturium-Uranium. While Canada has in the past fielded nuclear weapons, (BOMARC SAMs, Honest John SSMs, gravity bomb equipped CF-104s and AIR-2 Genies), the warheads were all US supplied and technically belonged to the US military. The BOMARCs and Genies lead to an amusing fight between the US military and Canadian customs. The former demanding total secrecy and the latter demanding to be allowed to check the shipments for contraband, (Customs didn't care about the nukes, just the booze that troops were constantly smuggling).
@@chakatfirepaw The point I was getting at is that while trying to do weapons-grade plutonium production in a common commercial PWR or BWR plant by scheduling multiple "refueling" outages per year would be extremely noticeable, merely shuffling fuel at a faster-than-usual rate through something like a CANDU to limit the Pu240 output might be easier to conceal, especially if this were done for only a fraction of the calandria's fuel channels while others continue to operate as normal, with expectedly long fuel-residence times. Of course the effect on overall neutron flux density, etc. would have to be carefully planned and managed. I do like the CANDU design overall, and have no concern over any covert weapons program ever being attempted in Canada itself, but such reactors deployed in certain other countries might benefit for some extra monitoring, as would any others capable of online refueling, or otherwise cycling fresh material through the core during normal operation.
Also when you're starting with natural U, you don't have to worry about criticality until you get to a fairly high enrichment with Pu it's a problem right away. Decay heat would also complicate things. Despite all this, it's believed that interest in AVLIS(atomic vapor laser isotope separation) had to do with Pu.
Thank you Scott for taking the time for making this series, ime fascinated by all things scientific but have struggled a little to fully digest Nuclear physics, its quite a fascinating subject with its material curiosity's & transitions ect, & wish i had studied it when i was much younger. Excellent well explained video's, keep up the cracking productions, ive managed to much more knowledge absorbed since you begun your series, from Luke in the UK
This series is super cool. I've always had an interest but people going insane over Chernobyl lately has reignited my interest. So cool! Thanks for putting this together!
Thank you so much Scott, my science teacher made us write a paragraph about plutonium production, and this explanation makes a lot more sense than the wikipedia one. You're a lifesaver.
Thank you for this long awaited vid in the series. I've honestly found these to be the most informative videos you've done about a subject I otherwise wouldn't know. Right up there with the orbital mechanics vids.
Out of all the Nuclear accidents, the ones that amaze me the most are the stories of the Demon Core and the Recklessness of the Scientists who treated it like a toy. Playing with Plutonium using a screwdriver to "'tickle the Dragons tail".
I don't think they were playing with it but more rather just removed the safety stoppers to get it closer to criticality, for research purposes or something
Fascinating. This is the first of this series that I have come across but am a big fan of your videos in general. I remember reading bits of this from my mums text books when she studied nuclear reactors in the early 80s before I was born.
People who have gotten to this point in the series deserve to hear this; nobody is going to end up on any government 'watch list' for watching it. Those people who are inclined to be so paranoid must never have been to the library and read any actual book on the topic; and there are plenty. An interesting fact is that some details about nuclear weapons and their development has been retroactively classified in the internet age. Back when I first became interested in the topic as a kid (in the 1990s), there seemed to be more of a casual attitude about nukes, the Cold War was over and practically everyone seemed to forgot about them, as if the risk disappeared. My teachers who for the most part were children during the height of the Cold War, were derisive of my interest in nuclear weapons. The entire concept to them seemed to be an intellectual dead end, an anachronism which stood in stark contrast to what seemed to be a brighter future in the 'me generation' 1990s.
The Cold War never really ended, and the fact that ‘both sides’ still have a good portion of their arsenals still intact points to the fact that you were probably more correct than a lot of people. It is a very interesting topic.
@@dale116dot7 I don't think much wharhead designs and much less pits themselves survived that long. Current arsenals on on level of 20% of Cold War numbers, mostly limited to 2-3 types of strategic warheads at least one of which has been designed in post-testing phase (french TNO)
I see your Sandia shirt. I had the pleasure of checking out a bunch of their weapons engineering and testing facilities. it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Really impressed with your videos! Incredibly informative, from a science & history sense. If ever get a chance to tour Hanford it's worth it. I've visited the B-reactor, as well as the vitrification plant site, including the cleanup efforts happening there (the fact that 57,000,000 gallons of high level liquid waste stored on site is sobering when you stand there on the banks of the Columbia River). It's shocking to see the level of construction & engineering they completed in 18months...& all along the way people made horrible, unconscionable mistakes.
OMG! I'm a chemist and I've never realized the U, Np, Pu nomenclature originated from the last three planets, and in order. Wait a minute, so if Pluto is no longer a regular planet, then Plutonium will have to be a dwarf element. 😂
@@Ansset0 doubt it, do you see what crap they teach kids these days...and as a chemistry, he probably is only focused on the portion of the table that applies to him
Great content! Pu-238 is very undesirable in weapon grade Plutonium as well because it heats and requires the electronics of the bomb and the fisible material itself to be refrigerated
Plop, Plop, fiz,fizz oh what a radioactive decaying neutron and gamma emitter it is, just enter washigton state from idaho side and you can smell the isotopes and hear their respective cries, saying "I'm like houdini if he was a man made element yall, give me thirty years and i can escape from any double lined recovery tank, yup!"
Loved the background music. I first watched Project X in 1987 with Mathew Broderick on a 747 when I was seven my first time realizing radiation in the Cold War
7:36 - Just love how these guys are using a very similar model of pallet jack to move the plutonium powered generator around that Walmart (and many, many other places) uses to move pallets of dog food around.
I recently discovered that you can take a public tour of B reactor at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. I grew up across the river from there but that was a long time ago. I really should go back and check it out someday.
8:56 event prompt criticality does not naturally lead to an explosion of the heavy metals. For that to occur you need prompt criticality (like Chernobyl - which was a steam explosion) and the implosion effects you described earlier in the series.
My decommissioning lecturer mentioned working with former labs that used plutonium, apparently, it's somewhat nightmarish to deal with as plutonium oxide dust is so fine it'll work its way up through screw threads
Sounds totally plausible - as it decays and breaks up (spallation) it'll shoot pieces far away which also spall and shoot and bombard more pieces and play a high frequency game of microscopic billiards and eventually get everywhere it wasn't supposed to. Really is the stuff of nightmares.
In my opinion, nuclear energy is very difficult and expensive to get into, but very worth it. You get waaaaay more radioisotope exposure living near a coal plant rather than a nuclear plant. But solar (especially newer facilities) is really cool, too. Plus, if you live near a solar plant, you get free cooked birds!
@@shanefiddle Solar will really take off only when we solve the problem of reliable and safe transmission of power down from orbit, and start building the power plants up there.
6:1 something I've often wondered is .. why do we use window and shielded glass instead of using mirror that only reflect visible light and not harder wavelengths? seems like mirrors would be much cheaper ... even if you had to replace them more often no ?
Scott is right about where Pu238 comes from now, but when we build thorium reactors, thorium comes out of the ground as Th232. Add one neutron and you get Th233 which decays to U233 (a fissile isotope, but also breeds to U235). As breeding continues, Pu238 can be chemically extracted and has no U238 in it to contaminate it (which would become Pu 239, Pu 240, etc.
I grew up in Oak Ridge. I’ve been to X-10(ORNL now), Y-12 and K-25(demolished). My mom and dad worked at the plants. My dad at all 3 and my mom at X-10(ORNL). My dad died of cancer when I was 10. It was from exposure to radiation from his work. My mom has horrible thyroid problems. Unknown if from exposure or just life. Thyroid is one place that radiation builds up first in humans. She wasn’t a scientist like my dad, but was in sensitive areas and both had Q clearances, which is the highest clearance you can get from DOE.
(10:01) In Alvin Weinberg's book "The First Nuclear Era: The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer", he talks about this and the general complexity of working with plutonium and how the people on the projected initially wanted to find an alternative to plutonium. The initial hope had been that they could breed U-233 from Th-232 and use that in a gun-type device. However, Glenn Seaborg found that when produced U-233, it was unavoidable that they'd also produce U-232, the latter having a high likelihood of spontaneous fission and thus likely to cause a gun-type device to pre-detonate or detonate with relatively little effective yield. (Been a while since I read it so I'm sure I'm mangling it some. The general gist that U-233, because of U-232, can't be used in a gun-type bomb though is correct). Because of this U-233 was shelved and the people on the project sucked it up and figured out how to work with Plutonium. Later, in 1955 I think, U-233 was once again evaluated as weapons material in Operation Teapot. One of the tested bombs had a composite U-233/Pu-239 core and it tested whether U-233 could be used in an implosion type device. However, the effective yield was 2/3 of what it should have been, with the conclusion being that the U-233 (and maybe U-232 by extension I suppose) had retarded the explosion. I don't know if the Soviets or anyone else ever evaluated U-233 as weapons materials, but the US only ever tried twice, after which the general consensus seems to have been "This @#$% sucks as weapons material. Let's never look at this again." Given the importance of and drive to acquire nuclear weapons over most of the last century and the relative ease with which you should be able to produce U-233, the fact that it was only ever considered for weapons material TWICE before being written off is quite telling, I think.
I had always wondered why so much electricity was needed for the reactors that were used for plutonium production and not electrical production and I think I finally got my answer in this video. If I’m not mistaken, can I assume that the vast amounts of electricity were needed for the continuous cooling of the reactors?
Just finished the serie right now. Loved every second. Hope to see more about nuclear power in your channel soon. What about the stories of spying between nuclear programs?
The UK "civil" nuclear program originally had quite a short irradiation of the fuel before discharge from the reactors, but with the military demand for plutonium decreasing and the cost of reprocessing increasing, the value of the irradiated fuel decreased, so a longer irradiation was used, thus extracting more usable energy from each element before discharge.
Sorry if it has been asked already, but may I ask where is this White Dwarf Supernova simulation coming from? I mean what software was used for it? It looks both awesome :) and also awfully powerful (computationally expensive) :O
I can't shake the thought of how it must have felt, if you were in a position of knowledge and responsibility within the nuclear bomb project in WWII. A science so far ahead, so unknown, and moving so quickly. I imagined it must have been a terrifying, dreadful feeling of "What on earth are we doing?", every time you had a chance to contemplate it. That's not even considering it as a weapon, just the nuclear science in general. Just the concept of these reactors and the atomic reactions happening inside of them must have felt incredibly intimidating.
So in trying to explain beta decay to someone, I recognized that the normal way it is described a lie we tell to children about beta decay. Basically, the idea that individual nucleons in the atom decay is just wrong. For instance, it makes sense with our lie to children version of beta decay that the more massive neutron emits something and becomes a lighter proton. However, this doesn't explain beta + decay, where a proton will turn into an neutron! This is because atoms decay, not individual nucleons! Basically, atoms are really just emergent "stuff" of the quark/gluon interaction. The resulting stability or instability of this field will result in decays of the entire atom rather than individual parts. This resulting decay manifests in atomic parts seemingly changing from one thing to another, but this is just the result of a lower level process playing out. So this is how a light proton can decay into a heavier neutron. More complexly is the idea that protons and neutrons don't actually have a real mass. Their apparent mass is just the result of the strong interaction of this quark field. The mass of a proton and neutron are ever changing in response to many conditions in the atom. If you have an even amount of protons, the atom is more stable and each part "weighs" less. Same to for an even amount of neutrons. Also, there are these things call magical numbers, which are the atomic version of electron orbitals resulting in extra stable elements when the proper amount of nuclions exist in the atom...resulting in seemingly lighter constituent parts! Basically, the entire idea of mass, decay and such of the atom is really confusing and the way we have to explain it at first really betrays some of the more fundamental processes at work!
Well, considering mass-energy equivalence and the tendency to refer to the 'mass' of subatomic particles in terms of a unit of energy... That should be no surprise. Nuclear power depends on converting mass to energy as well, so that's a fundamental element of nuclear theory...
I still hope that you will cover fusion and get to visit NIF or maybe have a holiday in europe and get to see JET or even ITER. But NIF seems more like an option. so I hope they let you in :)
One question about plutonium production, is a future need for it, when we start using "Project Orion" style nuclear pulse propulsion in rockets. Nothing else even close to coming off the drawing boards has nearly the potential for opening the Solar system, and it's 1960s technology.
Quick Question: Do we bury spent nuclear rods from, say submarines, because it is too expensive to reprocess them or are they useless and their is nothing further to be done?
"Fly Safe", he says as he teaches me how to make nukes... I mean, was I maybe NOT supposed to duct tape it under my lawn chair and use it for propulsion?
Just wish the government wouldn't get so butt hurt when I make even a few atoms of the stuff.
CODY! YOU'RE ALIVE!
ye ye but plutonium makes me bone hurt
A few atoms can't be illegal right ;)?
I knew you were going to be here.
I think you can run your farm for years with a few grams of it!
That was the most ominous sounding "fly safe" I have ever heard.
I feel like he unconsciously made me actually fly safe
...with the shockwave
Context is king.
@@Markle2k Should run an experiment where I take the audio of just those two words and present it to people without preamble and then record their reactions with out prompting them with any specific questions.
I was about to make the same comment when I saw you'd beaten me to it.
Great series Scott!! I have been studying Nuclear weapons, Delivery Systems and Nuclear strategy for 45 years. I served 10 years in the US Army and was trained for Nuclear, Chemical and Biological warfare during my service. Your videos provide straight forward information that an average "Joe" can understand. I enjoyed watching them and have learned from them as well. Keep up the great work!! Cheers Mate!
Thank you!
you have committed crimes against humanity.
@@rwjazz1299 what ever you say sunshine
This is just about the best weapons-grade nerd porn I've seen in a couple of years. Keep it going, Scott!
I just watched the whole series in a single row. One of the best and most informative I ever had. Can't wait to start my own production! Seems easier than brewing beer.
I’m a nuclear engineer; your TH-cam videos are spot on!
Unnessacary comment.. it’s Scott Manley we knew that. Jk lol your work fascinates me
lolz
nukiepoo lol
its called nukular engineer.
Hey nuki I wanted to ask you about some engineering designs I’ve developed.
"don't try this at home" 9:25 Cody'sLab;"hold my beer"
So your saying if one day I wake up with a mushroom cloud growing on the opposite end of the valley, I'll know at least it was Cody'sLab at his ranch messing with plutonium? :P
It's the Demon Core, which during two briefly supercritical accidents caused the death of 6
@@HappyBeezerStudios the demon core has got a bad rap. It's such a judgmental name. He's just a normal core trying to do his own thing
Probably more like hold my mead.
🐝 🍯
Considering Slotin died, it is quite the understatement.
Those early plutonium reactors remind me of the Windscale reactor. The British air cooled nuclear reactor meant to create plutonium for nuclear bombs. In typical British fashion, it didn't work right the first time, so by hand, they cut the cooling fins on the hundreds of thousands of fuel bundles down by a centimeter or so until it got hot enough to work properly. Later, they caught it on fire for 3 full days before someone realized that hey, maybe having all the cooling fans on full blast is making this fire harder to put out, rather than easier...
never mind the fallout
Going Nuclear are by far my fav videos of yours! Nuclear physics is so fun!
I don't even want to watch it because it's so short and I've been waiting for it for so long.
Agreed! Every episode that comes out causes me to re-watch the entire series start-to-finish..
@@eberlined The series started at just the right time for me, we were doing some rudimentary nuclear physics in school and I was craving more and this was perfect. I think I'll do a video of my own soon about RTGs, I just need to teach myself how thermocouples work before I can do that.
It's all fun and games until something goes critical!
Agreed, it's critical that you don't accidentally let something go critical.
Toured Oak Ridge during my undergraduate, saw that exact breeder reactor from a few feet away, one of the coolest places I have ever been to and the only place I have ever been to with armed guards to welcome you at the main gate. Love the series.
You lead a very quiet, passive life. There are plenty of places where armed guards greet you at the gate or door......
@@keitha.9788 good point Keith!
I get greeted by armed guards every time I show up at one of my customers gated residence. almost like entering the Baghdad Green Zone. They check and take a photo my ID, and require me to open my work van for search. Thats the length certain celebrities go through in 2022.
Your vids are some of the best I have ever seen about nuclear weapons. I used to watch you back in the days when your vids were that rocket simulation stuff and that doesn't interest me much, but I have just found this series that you made. Unbelievable that these never came into my feed before now, but yeah it is what it is, I'm very glad I found them now. Hope you are doing okay mate. After I watch this gonna check your channel and see what you have been up to lately. Thanks for all the time you spent on these vids I am really enjoying them. Most YT vids on this subject are very basic, a little dumbed-down but these are packed with information I did not previously know. Cheers mate, appreciate your hard work.
You have no idea how much I love these large-scale simulations.
I have students in my materials engineering courses who are skeptical about what kind of design applications phase changes affect and I just love getting more examples. Nuclear weapons is a field that always gets attention!
This series is outstanding and even thought I found it 4 years later, I am glad I did.
Yay! So glad to see you continuing the series. The suspense was super critical to this excitement.😉
I had to check, I don't even remember the last video in the series 6 months ago, though YT is sure that I actually watched it...
Unlike Neptunium-239 which is relatively unstable and undergoes rapid beta-decay, Plutonium-239 is relatively stable and undergoes slow alpha-decay. Your analogy does not hold.
9:26
Throwing some well-deserved shade at the demon core experiments, lol
You just got a new consistent viewer XD
Nuclear nerd and science nerd, you have made my day.
This has been a fascinating series, Scott. Thanks for doing all the amazing research! Great presentation, as always. Fly Safe!
Just found this series. In 2001, I was riding my motorcycle across the county and came across the EBR-1 in Idaho. The day visited, some of the machinists and an engineer that worked there back in the day were visiting and really made my tour of the facility much, much better.
Just wanted to add in. Anti-proliferation efforts include REQUIRING the 'toasting' of fuel in light-water reactors for a minimum amount of time to ensure the plutonium get sufficiently poisoned with Pu240 and Pu241. This works fairly well, as it's kind of hard for a country to take a 1GWe reactor offline without anyone noticing.
As for being able to use it for a bomb, technically you can get plutonium like this to fission despite the Pu241 poisoning, but the Pu240 makes it very likley to pre-detonate or hamstring the yield with a pre-detonation, as you alluded to a year ago in this series. As for separating out the different isotopes, you technically could do it, but no one really has on an industrial level. It's ridiculously inefficient, because instead of separating out essentially inert U238 from U235, with a 1.3% mass difference, you're trying to separate out radioactive Pu239 from Pu240 with a mass difference of 0.4%
Which gaseous compound you make from the material to separated it can alter how different these mass-differences end up being, but you're still stuck with having contaminated centrigues that require shielding and become very difficult to service and potentially need to be operating remotely. And this is ignoring all the chemistry-based shenanigans plutonium gets up to which you covered nicely in this video. The extra cost and difficulty and risk just isn't worth it. It's possible, but enriching Uranium secretly is much easier, which is why no one goes this route.
Anti-proliferation doesn't mean making stuff impossible. It just means not making things any easier than natural alternatives. In the case of reactor fuel, as long as proper toasting is enforced, plutonium's proliferation potential is essentially done away with because no one will bother.
Glad someone commented on stuff like that. People really seem to underestimate the scale and resources required to do anything with fuels and such.
It must be a bit more difficult to enforce this minimum fuel residence requirement for designs like CANDU that provide for online refueling, without ever having to shut the reactor down. Does any non nuclear-weapon state operate a CANDU or similar? I think I remember reading that India purchased one many years ago, then built their own version of it, but of course they're already a member of the "club".
@@jordanhazen7761
Um, your question is answered just by remembering what CANDU stands for: Canadian Deturium-Uranium. While Canada has in the past fielded nuclear weapons, (BOMARC SAMs, Honest John SSMs, gravity bomb equipped CF-104s and AIR-2 Genies), the warheads were all US supplied and technically belonged to the US military.
The BOMARCs and Genies lead to an amusing fight between the US military and Canadian customs. The former demanding total secrecy and the latter demanding to be allowed to check the shipments for contraband, (Customs didn't care about the nukes, just the booze that troops were constantly smuggling).
@@chakatfirepaw The point I was getting at is that while trying to do weapons-grade plutonium production in a common commercial PWR or BWR plant by scheduling multiple "refueling" outages per year would be extremely noticeable, merely shuffling fuel at a faster-than-usual rate through something like a CANDU to limit the Pu240 output might be easier to conceal, especially if this were done for only a fraction of the calandria's fuel channels while others continue to operate as normal, with expectedly long fuel-residence times. Of course the effect on overall neutron flux density, etc. would have to be carefully planned and managed.
I do like the CANDU design overall, and have no concern over any covert weapons program ever being attempted in Canada itself, but such reactors deployed in certain other countries might benefit for some extra monitoring, as would any others capable of online refueling, or otherwise cycling fresh material through the core during normal operation.
Also when you're starting with natural U, you don't have to worry about criticality until you get to a fairly high enrichment with Pu it's a problem right away. Decay heat would also complicate things. Despite all this, it's believed that interest in AVLIS(atomic vapor laser isotope separation) had to do with Pu.
Thank you Scott for taking the time for making this series,
ime fascinated by all things scientific but have struggled a little to fully digest Nuclear physics, its quite a fascinating subject with its material curiosity's & transitions ect, & wish i had studied it when i was much younger.
Excellent well explained video's, keep up the cracking productions, ive managed to much more knowledge absorbed since you begun your series,
from Luke in the UK
The Sandia National Labs shirt is a nice touch. Haha
Loving the thunder chicken.
Oh rats, you beat me to it by seven months. I was just about to post the same thing. Anyway, how apropos!
@@christophergreenDP and you beat me by 5 months...
So not only must one love the bomb, one must care for the bomb?
@ Not daily. But she is a demanding bitch that will not be denied. She can't even be thrown away...
@@gg5115 You sound like you speak from experience. I cease my questions here. :-P
well, she is liable to go off spontaneously if not properly cared for.
Never look directly at Happy Fun Bomb.
+
This series is super cool. I've always had an interest but people going insane over Chernobyl lately has reignited my interest. So cool! Thanks for putting this together!
Scott, I am glad that you explained how much tender, loving care goes into making weapons of mass destruction😊
Thank you so much Scott, my science teacher made us write a paragraph about plutonium production, and this explanation makes a lot more sense than the wikipedia one. You're a lifesaver.
This series is fantastic. Like always, Thank you.
Thank you for this long awaited vid in the series.
I've honestly found these to be the most informative videos you've done about a subject I otherwise wouldn't know. Right up there with the orbital mechanics vids.
Out of all the Nuclear accidents, the ones that amaze me the most are the stories of the Demon Core and the Recklessness of the Scientists who treated it like a toy. Playing with Plutonium using a screwdriver to "'tickle the Dragons tail".
I don't think they were playing with it but more rather just removed the safety stoppers to get it closer to criticality, for research purposes or something
@@october6432 monkeys playing with it, and got what they wanted.
I live in Washington and one of my neighbors used to work at Hanford. He has some really cool stories it’s very interesting stuff
Fascinating. This is the first of this series that I have come across but am a big fan of your videos in general.
I remember reading bits of this from my mums text books when she studied nuclear reactors in the early 80s before I was born.
People who have gotten to this point in the series deserve to hear this; nobody is going to end up on any government 'watch list' for watching it. Those people who are inclined to be so paranoid must never have been to the library and read any actual book on the topic; and there are plenty. An interesting fact is that some details about nuclear weapons and their development has been retroactively classified in the internet age. Back when I first became interested in the topic as a kid (in the 1990s), there seemed to be more of a casual attitude about nukes, the Cold War was over and practically everyone seemed to forgot about them, as if the risk disappeared. My teachers who for the most part were children during the height of the Cold War, were derisive of my interest in nuclear weapons. The entire concept to them seemed to be an intellectual dead end, an anachronism which stood in stark contrast to what seemed to be a brighter future in the 'me generation' 1990s.
Yep, same here. Anyone remember the 1979 The Progressive magazine-free speech kerfuffle?
The Cold War never really ended, and the fact that ‘both sides’ still have a good portion of their arsenals still intact points to the fact that you were probably more correct than a lot of people. It is a very interesting topic.
@@dale116dot7 I don't think much wharhead designs and much less pits themselves survived that long. Current arsenals on on level of 20% of Cold War numbers, mostly limited to 2-3 types of strategic warheads at least one of which has been designed in post-testing phase (french TNO)
I see your Sandia shirt. I had the pleasure of checking out a bunch of their weapons engineering and testing facilities. it was a once in a lifetime opportunity.
Really impressed with your videos! Incredibly informative, from a science & history sense. If ever get a chance to tour Hanford it's worth it. I've visited the B-reactor, as well as the vitrification plant site, including the cleanup efforts happening there (the fact that 57,000,000 gallons of high level liquid waste stored on site is sobering when you stand there on the banks of the Columbia River). It's shocking to see the level of construction & engineering they completed in 18months...& all along the way people made horrible, unconscionable mistakes.
Pretty sure I'm on the FBI watchlist now
When you already have the needed uranium reactor, your name sits there for quite some time
Wow! Top comment!
Oh dear, sweetheart. Good been on they're watchlist for years.
Thanks to the Pariot Act, every US citizen is on it for nearly two decades now lol
@@MaxiTB And the rest of us NSA keeps a eye on >_>
OMG! I'm a chemist and I've never realized the U, Np, Pu nomenclature originated from the last three planets, and in order. Wait a minute, so if Pluto is no longer a regular planet, then Plutonium will have to be a dwarf element. 😂
@k halliday yea it seems so obvious now haha
Chemist? Not to bright one, apparently. A lot of children know that at the age 12-13.
Initially the name "Plutium" was proposed, but when someone said plutonium, they went with that instead because it sounded way cooler.
@@Ansset0 doubt it, do you see what crap they teach kids these days...and as a chemistry, he probably is only focused on the portion of the table that applies to him
Considering how dangerous the material is, being named after the ruler of the Underworld is entirely correct.
Great content! Pu-238 is very undesirable in weapon grade Plutonium as well because it heats and requires the electronics of the bomb and the fisible material itself to be refrigerated
Scotty, your videos regarding science are always really good and compelling, love the going nuclear series!
Plop, Plop, fiz,fizz oh what a radioactive decaying neutron and gamma emitter it is, just enter washigton state from idaho side and you can smell the isotopes and hear their respective cries, saying "I'm like houdini if he was a man made element yall, give me thirty years and i can escape from any double lined recovery tank, yup!"
Nicely done! As an engineer at a nuclear plant it is refreshing to see something like this that I can't poke all kinds of holes in.
There’s a reason it’s been a long time since previous episode.
Always looking forward to another Going Nuclear. Fascinating every time.
Another awesome video Scott. I learned more in this video than most of my college classes. Wish I had you as a prof.
Loved the background music. I first watched Project X in 1987 with Mathew Broderick on a 747 when I was seven my first time realizing radiation in the Cold War
Is Plutonium now a dwarf element?
Horray! I've been patiently waiting for this video. Thanks for the great content, Mr. Manley!
Almost as long to make the video as it did to build the first atomic bomb!?
Visited the X-10 on a rainy day during a fishing trip. Fantastic tour.
Great explanations from a knowledgable source in language a layman can understand. Very useful for a fiction writer.
love the sandia labs shirt I had a few of them from a friend of mine who worked protecting the labs
Excellent series Scott. Good to see a science based explanation rather than the hysterics you see in the media.
I live near Hanford and was able to tour the B-reactor a couple of years ago. Such a neat piece of history.
Really? Do you have two ballsacks or anything weird like that?
Was a bit worried this would never come out. Thanks for this series Scott, very interesting stuff
Plutonium is just so phenomenally toxic and volatile... lovely stuff.
7:36 - Just love how these guys are using a very similar model of pallet jack to move the plutonium powered generator around that Walmart (and many, many other places) uses to move pallets of dog food around.
One of the best videos on this topic. Thank you.
Excellent videos by Scott Manley!
3:30 I love how on that diagram there is something labelled as "experimental hole"
Noticed that too!
Scot and Curious Droid both going nuclear this week.
I recently discovered that you can take a public tour of B reactor at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. I grew up across the river from there but that was a long time ago. I really should go back and check it out someday.
Thank you Scott for sharing all your knowledge with us, you really have the best videos.
Loved the evil supergenius manner in which you signed off after mentioning the WMDs today Scott.
At 12:25 the NNSA logo looks a bit like the word NASA at first glance (though completely different when compared).
love that shot of the plutonium in the cigar box.
Love the sandia labs tee shirt. The real life black mesa.
How could I have missed your channel... an oversite rectified.
Great video...
8:56 event prompt criticality does not naturally lead to an explosion of the heavy metals. For that to occur you need prompt criticality (like Chernobyl - which was a steam explosion) and the implosion effects you described earlier in the series.
My decommissioning lecturer mentioned working with former labs that used plutonium, apparently, it's somewhat nightmarish to deal with as plutonium oxide dust is so fine it'll work its way up through screw threads
Sounds totally plausible - as it decays and breaks up (spallation) it'll shoot pieces far away which also spall and shoot and bombard more pieces and play a high frequency game of microscopic billiards and eventually get everywhere it wasn't supposed to.
Really is the stuff of nightmares.
Wow, I can't believe we are still using nuclear reactors for electric generation. Solar is soooo much better.
In my opinion, nuclear energy is very difficult and expensive to get into, but very worth it. You get waaaaay more radioisotope exposure living near a coal plant rather than a nuclear plant. But solar (especially newer facilities) is really cool, too.
Plus, if you live near a solar plant, you get free cooked birds!
@@shanefiddle LOL. And so reliable! Well, when there are no clouds, I mean. And during the day only. Otherwise - so much better!
@@shanefiddle Solar will really take off only when we solve the problem of reliable and safe transmission of power down from orbit, and start building the power plants up there.
Scott, your work on the videos is exemplary!
I like your Sandia Labs shirt! I happen to be in the Albuquerque area.
6:1 something I've often wondered is .. why do we use window and shielded glass instead of using mirror that only reflect visible light and not harder wavelengths? seems like mirrors would be much cheaper ... even if you had to replace them more often no ?
I felt this should've ended more like "I'm Scott Manley, React Safe!"
Scott is right about where Pu238 comes from now, but when we build thorium reactors, thorium comes out of the ground as Th232. Add one neutron and you get Th233 which decays to U233 (a fissile isotope, but also breeds to U235). As breeding continues, Pu238 can be chemically extracted and has no U238 in it to contaminate it (which would become Pu 239, Pu 240, etc.
I apologize Scott. I didn't mean to be so critical, your presentation was great!
I grew up in Oak Ridge. I’ve been to X-10(ORNL now), Y-12 and K-25(demolished). My mom and dad worked at the plants. My dad at all 3 and my mom at X-10(ORNL). My dad died of cancer when I was 10. It was from exposure to radiation from his work. My mom has horrible thyroid problems. Unknown if from exposure or just life. Thyroid is one place that radiation builds up first in humans. She wasn’t a scientist like my dad, but was in sensitive areas and both had Q clearances, which is the highest clearance you can get from DOE.
(10:01) In Alvin Weinberg's book "The First Nuclear Era: The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer", he talks about this and the general complexity of working with plutonium and how the people on the projected initially wanted to find an alternative to plutonium. The initial hope had been that they could breed U-233 from Th-232 and use that in a gun-type device. However, Glenn Seaborg found that when produced U-233, it was unavoidable that they'd also produce U-232, the latter having a high likelihood of spontaneous fission and thus likely to cause a gun-type device to pre-detonate or detonate with relatively little effective yield. (Been a while since I read it so I'm sure I'm mangling it some. The general gist that U-233, because of U-232, can't be used in a gun-type bomb though is correct). Because of this U-233 was shelved and the people on the project sucked it up and figured out how to work with Plutonium.
Later, in 1955 I think, U-233 was once again evaluated as weapons material in Operation Teapot. One of the tested bombs had a composite U-233/Pu-239 core and it tested whether U-233 could be used in an implosion type device. However, the effective yield was 2/3 of what it should have been, with the conclusion being that the U-233 (and maybe U-232 by extension I suppose) had retarded the explosion.
I don't know if the Soviets or anyone else ever evaluated U-233 as weapons materials, but the US only ever tried twice, after which the general consensus seems to have been "This @#$% sucks as weapons material. Let's never look at this again." Given the importance of and drive to acquire nuclear weapons over most of the last century and the relative ease with which you should be able to produce U-233, the fact that it was only ever considered for weapons material TWICE before being written off is quite telling, I think.
I had always wondered why so much electricity was needed for the reactors that were used for plutonium production and not electrical production and I think I finally got my answer in this video. If I’m not mistaken, can I assume that the vast amounts of electricity were needed for the continuous cooling of the reactors?
Tennessee Valley Authority
Just finished the serie right now. Loved every second. Hope to see more about nuclear power in your channel soon.
What about the stories of spying between nuclear programs?
I've noticed "Manhattan" is misspelled in a number of places, some kinda coded message?
I kinda expected you to say "I'm Scott Manley, nuke safe!" this time around
I don't have time to watch right now, but I'm really excited to watch later today!
It was so good, worth the wait.
This is great - I also like the Sandia Corporation T-shirt.
that pic of the guy holding thgat half ball gives me chills
FYI, X10 is the name of the facility where the graphite reactor was built, not the project name.
The UK "civil" nuclear program originally had quite a short irradiation of the fuel before discharge from the reactors, but with the military demand for plutonium decreasing and the cost of reprocessing increasing, the value of the irradiated fuel decreased, so a longer irradiation was used, thus extracting more usable energy from each element before discharge.
I love your plutonium shaped head Scot Manley.
Finally, the next part of the You're On A List Now series is out!
Sorry if it has been asked already, but may I ask where is this White Dwarf Supernova simulation coming from? I mean what software was used for it? It looks both awesome :) and also awfully powerful (computationally expensive) :O
I live in oak ridge, 5 minutes away from the entrance of the lab mentioned in the video. It’s an incredible place.
I have been in that room in X10. I live in Oak Ridge. X10 gets openned to the public about once a year.
I can't shake the thought of how it must have felt, if you were in a position of knowledge and responsibility within the nuclear bomb project in WWII. A science so far ahead, so unknown, and moving so quickly. I imagined it must have been a terrifying, dreadful feeling of "What on earth are we doing?", every time you had a chance to contemplate it. That's not even considering it as a weapon, just the nuclear science in general. Just the concept of these reactors and the atomic reactions happening inside of them must have felt incredibly intimidating.
Ahhh. My favorite Scott manley series returns.
I love the new hair cut Scott! Keep up the good work.
Scott - for your next family vacation, why not EBR-1, west of Idaho Falls?
So in trying to explain beta decay to someone, I recognized that the normal way it is described a lie we tell to children about beta decay.
Basically, the idea that individual nucleons in the atom decay is just wrong. For instance, it makes sense with our lie to children version of beta decay that the more massive neutron emits something and becomes a lighter proton. However, this doesn't explain beta + decay, where a proton will turn into an neutron! This is because atoms decay, not individual nucleons! Basically, atoms are really just emergent "stuff" of the quark/gluon interaction. The resulting stability or instability of this field will result in decays of the entire atom rather than individual parts. This resulting decay manifests in atomic parts seemingly changing from one thing to another, but this is just the result of a lower level process playing out. So this is how a light proton can decay into a heavier neutron.
More complexly is the idea that protons and neutrons don't actually have a real mass. Their apparent mass is just the result of the strong interaction of this quark field. The mass of a proton and neutron are ever changing in response to many conditions in the atom. If you have an even amount of protons, the atom is more stable and each part "weighs" less. Same to for an even amount of neutrons. Also, there are these things call magical numbers, which are the atomic version of electron orbitals resulting in extra stable elements when the proper amount of nuclions exist in the atom...resulting in seemingly lighter constituent parts! Basically, the entire idea of mass, decay and such of the atom is really confusing and the way we have to explain it at first really betrays some of the more fundamental processes at work!
Quarks weren't theorized until 1964. Simpler models worked well enough for the Manhattan Project.
@@bioriderfc Oh for sure, but even some nuclear engineering textbooks will engage in this kind of thing!
Well, considering mass-energy equivalence and the tendency to refer to the 'mass' of subatomic particles in terms of a unit of energy... That should be no surprise.
Nuclear power depends on converting mass to energy as well, so that's a fundamental element of nuclear theory...
Don't listen to that, kids! This is just the government tries to confuse you into not building your own breeding reactor!
It never made sense to me that a "point particle" would come from 'quark matter'. Now tell me about the neutrinos George.
6:05 - What did they do if a spent fuelrod got stuck on the way down?
They used a bigger hammer.
I'd love for you to do a video or small series about what happened in the various nuclear accidents in a similar style to this series :)
Me too! Also an episode about the long term health of people who worked the reactors, and what long term exposure does to a person.
I still hope that you will cover fusion and get to visit NIF or maybe have a holiday in europe and get to see JET or even ITER. But NIF seems more like an option. so I hope they let you in :)
One question about plutonium production, is a future need for it, when we start using "Project Orion" style nuclear pulse propulsion in rockets.
Nothing else even close to coming off the drawing boards has nearly the potential for opening the Solar system, and it's 1960s technology.
Sandia National Lab tee-shirt... Nice touch
Iran is gonna love this video series.
Quick Question: Do we bury spent nuclear rods from, say submarines, because it is too expensive to reprocess them or are they useless and their is nothing further to be done?
"Fly Safe", he says as he teaches me how to make nukes... I mean, was I maybe NOT supposed to duct tape it under my lawn chair and use it for propulsion?
Project Orion 2: Lawn Chair Boogaloo
You're supposed to launch it outa a mortar into the enemy lines.
Well, we learned that in 9th class.
@@glorvalmacglorvas6082 Davy Crockett anybody?
I am sure you can use a two-stage thermonuclear bomb with an actively cooled tungsten combustion chamber to propel you... for a good 0.07 seconds