And yes, we're aware that many electrically powered exit signs have battery backups that have to be regularly replaced. But if you were using JUST batteries, rather than battery backup, that would be a lot of work. So much work that you might consider dropping ~$300 on a tritium exit sign that lasts 20 years.
or since there is usually light in these places you can buy a sign that glows for a few hours after the lights go out. there are several brands. they charge up when there is light and can glow for many hours after the light goes out. they are photo-luminescent but not radioactive in any way.
Canada sold those reactors to other countries, partly because you could sell them a reactor without the enriched uranium they might have other plans for. It was a very Canadian solution in that way. I wonder if those other countries are now capturing the tritium in the way Canada is.
@@eddydogleg Bingo! So many benefits. From the ability to literally hand-pull rods in an emergency to the lack of a huge pressurized containment dome, plus the ability to use natural uranium OR thorium or a blend of fuels... The world needs CANDU more than ever!
Couldn't have said it better myself. Like the Dash 8 plane, basic well designed engineering, durability and repairability are key factors in its design. In other words they're made to the tough, real world conditions of Canada which is why almost all the existing reactors are still running with life extension projects planned for most if not all of the ones in Ontario, Quebec and NB, including the shuttered Gentilly facility and the wonky Point Lepreau reactor... The only one that brings down the usage rate of the whole program and I know why. It's second planned reactor wasn't built so when it needs maintenance the whole facility goes offline instead of just switching between turbines...
The Wikipedia page for CANDU is pretty detailed and discusses the sales to China, India, South Korea, Argentina and Romania. Interestingly Canada halted working with India on their nuclear program after they exploded their first atomic bomb. It also mentions tritium production as a byproduct but doesn’t specify what other countries do with their tritium output.
stars ARE hot, but not nearly hot enough for they type of fusion we do down on earth. stars rely on much higher pressures and larger volumes to produce the fusion. we have to do it a lot faster if we want to produce any meaningful power. for example, you sitting in your chair produce more heat per second than the same amount of sun material does.
@@AlexKarasev"approximately 276.5 watts per cubic metre at the center of the core,[70] which, according to Karl Kruszelnicki, is about the same power density inside a compost pile.[71]" taken from Wikipedia page on Sun
@@deathrobloxian thanks for the info & for the source! My question was about the "per" part, namely, given the temperature and pressure matching those inside the center Sun and the same material makeup, would the same reaction take place if the total volume is much less than that of the Sun, like a thimble or a cup or a vubic meter or a cubic kilometer size? Or we'd need something on the order of the size of the Sun's core for it to take place? The question isn't about "you need the weight of the Sun to achieve tbat pressure in the center" - I get that. If we got that pressure & temp as a given at any volume we want (i.e. we maintain the pressure and the temp doesn't "bleed off" too fast), would any small volume work or due to low energy density and other reasons it'd only work on stellar scales?
@@AlexKarasev Well if you manage go keep conditions the same as sun core the amount of energy outputted would just correlate to that. Large volume for large amounts of energy small volume for small amounts of energy. Volume isn't relevant when keeping conditions like pressure and temperature the same (well unless you the volume so small that you can count the atoms)
as an intern at ontario hydro in 1982 i went on a field trip with my supervisors to pickering nuclear plant where we had a tour to check on the progress of adding 4 more reactors. i think we toured unit 6 or 7 extensively. i got to walk across the top of the reactor inside it's containment capsule . had to put on tyvek booties. never saw more pipes and heavy rebar in my life. it was fun.
We bought those tritium-fluoresced exit signs for a building that handles flammable liquids, which was less expensive than having explosion-proof exit lights (not sure intrinsically safe was available at the time). With a tritium half life of 33 years, the signs were good for 20 years
It's 20 years maintenance free, and then checked every 5 or so years up to another 20 years 🤭 explosion proof buildings don't typically have windows so they put them inside 😀
Gods, I really wish we as a country didn't sell off the rights to Candu reactors to a private interest, rather than taking the time and money to make use of them as a source of energy rather than relying on our tar sands.
This is not an either-or situation. More nuclear power generation is not being hampered by the ownership rights of CANDU reactor technologies. I’ve worked in building Solar and Wind electricity farms and I am a huge supporter of nuclear power.
It’s incredibly unlikely the tar sands would not have been developed. The amount of oil there is too big to ignore and there’s too much money to be made. I’m in no way a fan of the production of oil from those deposits, but I’m also a realist - big money, big business always finds a way to do what they want.
According to NFPA code, ALL exit signs in the US must have at least 90 minute battery backup built in. These backup batteries are required to be tested regularly and replaced as needed. Proper record keeping of monthly tests is important, not only for safety of the occupants, also as a requirement to obtain insurance and for meeting audit standards.
Here in Ontario Canada we have a 30 minute requirement, and the exit signs dont need to have the battery built in, but do need to be connected to a battery backup. These self illuminated signs are technically an acceptable alternative, however you have to have a flourescent light source shining on them at all times so when the power does go out they have enough stored energy to function. Plus these signs are damn expensive and need replacement every 10 years (Ive seen some 20 year ones, but the supplier here currently lists them as discounted or unavailable and only have the 10 year ones listed) I can buy an exit sign, with an emergency light unit on top, and the battery for less than one of these signs, and then replace the 30 dollar battery every 5-10 years depending on the manufacturer specification and the annual testing results. Id say 99% of places are not going to these self illuminated signs any time soon. Especially since they're going to need emergency egress lights other than the signs that'll require the battery backups anyways it make little sense to put these other than say you need to add in one sign after a small renovation and dont wanna have power run and such (although id venture a guess itll be cheaper to do it that way, especially after the first year of running 60 or 80 watts of florescent bulbs 24/7 to keep the sign charged up) On the surface they seem like a great idea but in practical applications their use is quite limited and costly compared to the current technology. When we went from 30 watts of incandescent bulbs to 3 watts of LED that was a great upgrade to the technology and that also made achieving long battery backup run times easy to achieve, and made the self contained type of sign, the ones with the little 2.4, 3.6, 4.8v cordless phone type batteries, cheap and viable, Im not a fan of these personally but they're pretty popular now.
this Video begs a totally unrelated question. why are there red exit signs in the US - and some green ones wheres every exit sign I encountered here in Europe was always green(which seems reasonable to have a common standard)?
In US OSHA requires exit signs in workplaces, but it doesn't mandate any specific color (just that it be "distinctive"). So you get local authorities that mandate color, and those local requirements are not consistent across the US.
I mean, this is great and all but we already knew about this in the 1960s. We *stopped* using tritium mostly because American Atomics poisoned the entire city of Tucson with it.
As someone who services emergency egress lights (exit signs and the lighting that comes on when the power goes off,), I can confirm that all of those exit signs you walked past, and more, could be backed up off of one large battery or a combination of smaller batteries, and that batter could last up to 10 years before needing replacement. Other exit sign designs have their own battery in them (similar to a cordless phone battery) those also last for years as well. One of those self luminous signs wholesales for about 250 canadian dollars, and last for 10 years before needing replacement. One of the largest batteries(12v 35AH) for emergency lighting is about 60 bucks wholesale raplced every 5 to 10 years (or the whole unit that contains the battery and charger is about 500 with the battery replaced as i said every 5to10 years at 60 dollars wholesale) and it can power a dozen or more exit signs and many light heads. These signs definitely have their place but their place is quite specific, one condition is they need to have a florescent light source shining on them 24hrs a day in order to be installed in a place so when thecpower goes off theyvwill perform properly and meet fire code requirements, that alone makes them somewhat impractical for many places, 60-80 watts or more of lights needing to be left on all the time (even when the building is close) versus a modern LED exit sign only consuming a few watts is a big negative factor for these. Maybe in a hospital type setting for example where lights are always on anyways sure it can be practical. But then you still need the batery backup for the emergency lighting, so the batteries arebstill going to need annual testing and regular replacement, sure, you may need10 or 20% less batteries in a given building, but the signs will still beed replacement at their 10 year intervals, and one sign is the cost of 4 verry large (think small car battery) sized batteries.
Can you make fast neutrons with a linac? What about manufacturing T with a linac firing neutrons into a cylinder of D2O, maybe even with a beryllium reflector to maximize collisions?
Strangely enough......or maybe not.....he neglected to mention the usage of tritium in firearms. The military is a huge consumer of tritium equipped light weapons. I believe some watches also use tritium on their dial faces.
I always wondered why 99% of exit signs were posted high above and never on the bottom of a wall. If you are supposed to stay as low as possible because smoke rises how can you see the exit sign?
Hello, chemist! Could you please explain, or at least give the right direction to understanding of process of discovering a matter's formula, evaluating it's structure? How do we know there's benzol ring there, how do we know the angles in methane molecule? Are these but assumptions?
That's not right. A Helium atom (like any noble gas in its column of the periodic table) is very good at grabbing and tightly holding on to its electrons. That is what makes them "noble" - i.e. chemically inert. So, except in their extremely highly energetic form (e.g. where He nuclei - aka alpha particles - are themselves the by-product of nuclear FISSION of much heavier radioactive elements - not the case we're talking about here), they are NEVER ionized (I.e. can't be "positively charged"). What happens when a high-energy He nucleus loses enough energy to capture its full complement of two electrons, it will grab them from other atoms, usually by prying them away from nearby compounds (or larger atoms that hold onto them less strongly. That happens all the time in any number of chemical reactions.
Humm i'm french and we have lots of nuclear reactors here. Not of the same type we use regular water, but it still produces some tritium, i know because they regularly leak it XD . I wonder how dilute it is, maybe with those prices we will start extracting it here...
If you enrich it you're also going to be producing heavy water. So maybe you could set up some heavy water production plants at the nuclear powerplants, and use the waste water from the reactors as feedstock?
CANDU reactors are a gold mine as it were, even if they're only producing clean energy with natural uranium and heavy water! ;-) Seriously though the technology is woefully underused as a power source globally and really should be adopted by more nations as a third way alternative between American-European light water designs and those from the Eastern bloc with a mix of older graphite moderated and water-moderated designs...
Should have watched the video before I went and collected all my neighbour’s garbage and stored it in my garage. I made a few sales on Craigslist but none at $30,000 per gram. 😢
Tritium has a 12.33 year half life. That makes it actually decay quite fast (not very fast but most of it should be gone within a century or so). What you should calculate is how many can you expect to be burned in a waste burning plant in one go (for one gram of tritium to escape, you need to burn 10000 of them), by how much this will increase the concentration of fast decaying atoms in the air (even with burning those 10000 in one go, I suspect, almost negligible) and how much this will contribute to increase the radiation in the area affected by the exhaust of the waste burning plant. And then ask yourself the question; do I ingest more radioactive material by eating that banana I just bought in the supermarket than inhaling a whiff of the 'magic' smoke...
@@jiriwichern I know... my last whole body scintillation scan showed way more banana counts than materials from chernobil. But the Chernobyl peak was visible above the background. And I was >1000km away.
That was the Japanese government's fossil fuel tax income talking. Millions of tonnes of water, yes, but the contained tritium was, if I recall, 0.5 grams.
Just an comparison of how much actual radiation Japan is dumping into an entire OCEAN, it is similar to what Ontario "dumps" into 2 great lakes. As we are all not glowing in the dark here, it is not a dangerous level. A lower exposure than a commercial airline flight. I have regularly windsurfed next to both of Lake Ontarios NPP. I am Still here. At Pickering you can sometimes feel the discharged water as it is warmer. The discharge water has tighter controls than many countries drinking water in fact.
the whole Fukushima filled up by tanks with thritium water. Not 100% thritium, of course, just a bit more than allowed limit, but millions tonns! For free, just take it out from Japan! Ooops. Useless, as its almost impossible to enrich thritium, only intentional produce it. BTW thritium lights almost disappeared from market in recent years. 5 years ago thritium lights (keyrings, badges etc) were available in any Chinese ebay shop. Now - ooops, only very expensive versions in literally several shops. So my cat will continue to wear his nuclear navigation and parking lights up to his death, but next cat, in 15 years, when these lights decay too, will not get anything.
Canceling on matter requires interacting with matter, and neutrinos basically don't do that. Like, nuetrinos will pass straight through the whole planet without a single interaction with the matter inside, so neutrino interactions with the rest of the world are rare enough to be very nearly irrelevant.
@@tristanridley1601 hm.. i thought to ask chatGPT. "One notable example is Geordi La Forge, played by Canadian actor LeVar Burton in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Though La Forge’s specific nationality is not often highlighted, in an alternate timeline (from the novel The Buried Age), he is said to be Canadian, adding a layer of potential Canadian identity to the character." i have not verified
Hey man, you forgot the other convenient source of Tritium. Some nice folks over in this little city called Fukushima was kind enough to release tons of it a few years back. It's all in this easy to access place called the Pacific ocean, which, according to my notes, is just west of here! :)
Actually, the release of tritium from Fukushima amounts to 0.06 grams per year, so you are off by a factor of tens of millions. This is also less than many other nuclear reactors release as part of their regular operations.
That is like saying that the 0,1% alcohol in some fruit juice or similar is equivalent to 100% grain alcohol. The news stories of "a bajillion tons of radioactive waste" are generally not mentioning that it would be like pouring a can of beer into a swimming pool and calling it an intoxicating drink.
A neutron and a proton weigh roughly the same, therefore a nucleus with a proton and a neutron (deuterium) weighs roughly double a nucleus with just a proton (hydrogen).
Soo.. even snakeoil fusion reactors need actual working nuclear power plants to function. And even if their dreams materialized, and we could scale up fusion and generate actual usable energy with it, we would also need to scale up the number of CANDU fission plants. Fusion is so hopeless.
think of it more like a science experiment with (potentially) much larger economic implications than CERN or LIGO or JWST. those also cost billions and have no product to speak of. the science of fusion is actually fairly settled afaik; it's all about getting the recipe right and engineering a setup that can reliably output saleable energy. once a prototype actually works, we might be able to completely phase out fossil fuels within a decade or two - those are some pretty great returns! and btw, if fission is required as step one of a fusion process, it should still output wayyy more power per gram of fission fuel than what it currently does.
Deuterium is roughly double the mass of hydrogen, but oxygen is almost 16x heavier, so doubling the mass of the hydrogen atoms doesn't have as huge an effect as you may expect.
And yes, we're aware that many electrically powered exit signs have battery backups that have to be regularly replaced. But if you were using JUST batteries, rather than battery backup, that would be a lot of work. So much work that you might consider dropping ~$300 on a tritium exit sign that lasts 20 years.
or since there is usually light in these places you can buy a sign that glows for a few hours after the lights go out. there are several brands. they charge up when there is light and can glow for many hours after the light goes out. they are photo-luminescent but not radioactive in any way.
As a Canadian I can confirm. We also use the T2O to make the coffee at Timmie’s stronger. A double double is not two milk two sugar but D2O and T2O
Radioactive coffee, eh? CANDU!
I thought they used a combo of nicotine and heroin at timmies lol
@@ACSReactions How else would Canadians get the "glowing hearts" mentioned in our anthem? Ancient Canadian secret... ;-)
Deuterated caffeine 😍 last longer 🥰
I can not stand by while Timmies deuterates our precious bodily fluids.
Canada sold those reactors to other countries, partly because you could sell them a reactor without the enriched uranium they might have other plans for. It was a very Canadian solution in that way. I wonder if those other countries are now capturing the tritium in the way Canada is.
I think another benefit to the CANDU design is that it the calandria doesn't require heavy forging for a reactor vessel.
@@eddydogleg Bingo! So many benefits. From the ability to literally hand-pull rods in an emergency to the lack of a huge pressurized containment dome, plus the ability to use natural uranium OR thorium or a blend of fuels... The world needs CANDU more than ever!
Couldn't have said it better myself. Like the Dash 8 plane, basic well designed engineering, durability and repairability are key factors in its design. In other words they're made to the tough, real world conditions of Canada which is why almost all the existing reactors are still running with life extension projects planned for most if not all of the ones in Ontario, Quebec and NB, including the shuttered Gentilly facility and the wonky Point Lepreau reactor... The only one that brings down the usage rate of the whole program and I know why. It's second planned reactor wasn't built so when it needs maintenance the whole facility goes offline instead of just switching between turbines...
The Wikipedia page for CANDU is pretty detailed and discusses the sales to China, India, South Korea, Argentina and Romania. Interestingly Canada halted working with India on their nuclear program after they exploded their first atomic bomb. It also mentions tritium production as a byproduct but doesn’t specify what other countries do with their tritium output.
As a Canadian nuclear engineer I had about 1 mSv pass through my bladder as a free gift from my employer.
Nuclearelectrica of Romania and KHNP of South Korea are building a tritium removal plant near the CANDU reactor in Cernavoda.
stars ARE hot, but not nearly hot enough for they type of fusion we do down on earth. stars rely on much higher pressures and larger volumes to produce the fusion. we have to do it a lot faster if we want to produce any meaningful power. for example, you sitting in your chair produce more heat per second than the same amount of sun material does.
Good point, thanks for making it!
How would volume factor into it? Unless you mean going from units of atoms to thimble size
@@AlexKarasev"approximately 276.5 watts per cubic metre at the center of the core,[70] which, according to Karl Kruszelnicki, is about the same power density inside a compost pile.[71]"
taken from Wikipedia page on Sun
@@deathrobloxian thanks for the info & for the source! My question was about the "per" part, namely, given the temperature and pressure matching those inside the center Sun and the same material makeup, would the same reaction take place if the total volume is much less than that of the Sun, like a thimble or a cup or a vubic meter or a cubic kilometer size? Or we'd need something on the order of the size of the Sun's core for it to take place? The question isn't about "you need the weight of the Sun to achieve tbat pressure in the center" - I get that. If we got that pressure & temp as a given at any volume we want (i.e. we maintain the pressure and the temp doesn't "bleed off" too fast), would any small volume work or due to low energy density and other reasons it'd only work on stellar scales?
@@AlexKarasev Well if you manage go keep conditions the same as sun core the amount of energy outputted would just correlate to that.
Large volume for large amounts of energy small volume for small amounts of energy.
Volume isn't relevant when keeping conditions like pressure and temperature the same
(well unless you the volume so small that you can count the atoms)
George, just wanted you to know that I appreciate all the transitions/cuts in this and previous videos.
Thank you!!
I appreciate all the walking to look at all the damn signs!! 😅
I feel seen.
Loving the storytelling and editing for your videos lately.
as an intern at ontario hydro in 1982 i went on a field trip with my supervisors to pickering nuclear plant where we had a tour to check on the progress of adding 4 more reactors. i think we toured unit 6 or 7 extensively. i got to walk across the top of the reactor inside it's containment capsule . had to put on tyvek booties. never saw more pipes and heavy rebar in my life. it was fun.
We bought those tritium-fluoresced exit signs for a building that handles flammable liquids, which was less expensive than having explosion-proof exit lights (not sure intrinsically safe was available at the time). With a tritium half life of 33 years, the signs were good for 20 years
It's 20 years maintenance free, and then checked every 5 or so years up to another 20 years 🤭 explosion proof buildings don't typically have windows so they put them inside 😀
Gods, I really wish we as a country didn't sell off the rights to Candu reactors to a private interest, rather than taking the time and money to make use of them as a source of energy rather than relying on our tar sands.
Plutocracy
@@the_expidition427Copper wire stripping
This is not an either-or situation. More nuclear power generation is not being hampered by the ownership rights of CANDU reactor technologies. I’ve worked in building Solar and Wind electricity farms and I am a huge supporter of nuclear power.
It’s incredibly unlikely the tar sands would not have been developed. The amount of oil there is too big to ignore and there’s too much money to be made. I’m in no way a fan of the production of oil from those deposits, but I’m also a realist - big money, big business always finds a way to do what they want.
they tried to for 50 years but no one was buying them.
Always love the way you present stuff, and the editing here is the work of a comedic genius.
Plus, this time I really had no idea of this, thanks!
According to NFPA code, ALL exit signs in the US must have at least 90 minute battery backup built in.
These backup batteries are required to be tested regularly and replaced as needed. Proper record keeping of monthly tests is important, not only for safety of the occupants, also as a requirement to obtain insurance and for meeting audit standards.
Here in Ontario Canada we have a 30 minute requirement, and the exit signs dont need to have the battery built in, but do need to be connected to a battery backup.
These self illuminated signs are technically an acceptable alternative, however you have to have a flourescent light source shining on them at all times so when the power does go out they have enough stored energy to function.
Plus these signs are damn expensive and need replacement every 10 years (Ive seen some 20 year ones, but the supplier here currently lists them as discounted or unavailable and only have the 10 year ones listed)
I can buy an exit sign, with an emergency light unit on top, and the battery for less than one of these signs, and then replace the 30 dollar battery every 5-10 years depending on the manufacturer specification and the annual testing results. Id say 99% of places are not going to these self illuminated signs any time soon. Especially since they're going to need emergency egress lights other than the signs that'll require the battery backups anyways it make little sense to put these other than say you need to add in one sign after a small renovation and dont wanna have power run and such (although id venture a guess itll be cheaper to do it that way, especially after the first year of running 60 or 80 watts of florescent bulbs 24/7 to keep the sign charged up)
On the surface they seem like a great idea but in practical applications their use is quite limited and costly compared to the current technology. When we went from 30 watts of incandescent bulbs to 3 watts of LED that was a great upgrade to the technology and that also made achieving long battery backup run times easy to achieve, and made the self contained type of sign, the ones with the little 2.4, 3.6, 4.8v
cordless phone type batteries, cheap and viable, Im not a fan of these personally but they're pretty popular now.
If that's true, then I'm worth about 6 billion.
I'm pretty trashy too.. I'd sell for $50,000/gram.. I don't glow in the dark though
So how much tritium do the Canadian reactors produce a year? The global total is around 27kg a year but what portion is from Canada?
OK, your scene cuts are *excellent*. Love.
this Video begs a totally unrelated question. why are there red exit signs in the US - and some green ones wheres every exit sign I encountered here in Europe was always green(which seems reasonable to have a common standard)?
In US OSHA requires exit signs in workplaces, but it doesn't mandate any specific color (just that it be "distinctive"). So you get local authorities that mandate color, and those local requirements are not consistent across the US.
Red is for exit green indicates path to exit
@@TheThagenesis green: "I'll just be leaving", red: "omg PORK CHOP SANDWICHES!!! we are all gonna die!!!"
Maybe the guy picking the color at the manufacturer was colorblind
I mean, this is great and all but we already knew about this in the 1960s. We *stopped* using tritium mostly because American Atomics poisoned the entire city of Tucson with it.
just wanna say I always hated Chemistry at school but these vids are so fun easy and enjoyable to watch, thanks team
Might have to watch this twice... zoned out marvelling at the long-sleeved t-shirt!
Hey the TH-cam comments section bullied George into buying a new shirt, so you folks better appreciate it.
Gasoline was originally a byproduct as well, right?
yeah good connection, it was first thought to be an annoying waste product. Similar for natural gas too
Oh interesting, I didn't know that
Yep. It was considered too volatile and energetic to be used safely.
@@custos3249 they were right.
@@ryuuguu01 Ok, Lance Armstrong
Typically they just have a centrally located battery bank for exist signs. Smaller building will have individual batteries in the signs.
As someone who services emergency egress lights (exit signs and the lighting that comes on when the power goes off,), I can confirm that all of those exit signs you walked past, and more, could be backed up off of one large battery or a combination of smaller batteries, and that batter could last up to 10 years before needing replacement.
Other exit sign designs have their own battery in them (similar to a cordless phone battery) those also last for years as well.
One of those self luminous signs wholesales for about 250 canadian dollars, and last for 10 years before needing replacement.
One of the largest batteries(12v 35AH) for emergency lighting is about 60 bucks wholesale raplced every 5 to 10 years (or the whole unit that contains the battery and charger is about 500 with the battery replaced as i said every 5to10 years at 60 dollars wholesale) and it can power a dozen or more exit signs and many light heads.
These signs definitely have their place but their place is quite specific, one condition is they need to have a florescent light source shining on them 24hrs a day in order to be installed in a place so when thecpower goes off theyvwill perform properly and meet fire code requirements, that alone makes them somewhat impractical for many places, 60-80 watts or more of lights needing to be left on all the time (even when the building is close) versus a modern LED exit sign only consuming a few watts is a big negative factor for these. Maybe in a hospital type setting for example where lights are always on anyways sure it can be practical. But then you still need the batery backup for the emergency lighting, so the batteries arebstill going to need annual testing and regular replacement, sure, you may need10 or 20% less batteries in a given building, but the signs will still beed replacement at their 10 year intervals, and one sign is the cost of 4 verry large (think small car battery) sized batteries.
the rim shot is fine but you have to use it in every video now
Great video. Educational. Thank you
RS. Canada
Can you make fast neutrons with a linac? What about manufacturing T with a linac firing neutrons into a cylinder of D2O, maybe even with a beryllium reflector to maximize collisions?
My understanding is that D2O doesn't absorb enough neutrons to make this financially viable. You really do need reactor-core sized quantities of D2O
Props to your audio engineer! Much better, thanks!
Tritium is used frequently to make glowing night sights and optics for firearms. A little more reliable than glow paint...
Strangely enough......or maybe not.....he neglected to mention the usage of tritium in firearms. The military is a huge consumer
of tritium equipped light weapons. I believe some watches also use tritium on their dial faces.
I always wondered why 99% of exit signs were posted high above and never on the bottom of a wall. If you are supposed to stay as low as possible because smoke rises how can you see the exit sign?
Great episode. Now we know how fusion can be economical and the pathway to building the reactor and supply chains.
*The new trick is to use MUCH less heat and about 1500 bars of pressure*
"Don't worry, I'm not poisoning myself -- we can't afford that!"
😂
Where did you manage to find actually good tritium glow vials?
Well actually 🤓☝️ (channeling my inner nerd)
At 06:40 you do show (some of) the electrons - as the bonds between the oxygen nucleus and the protons.
Sigh. You are correct. Here's your WellAckshully badge
@@ACSReactions hooray!
Pedants unite!
(As long as we know when we're being pedantic)
There aren't 19 reactors "across" Canada. They are all in S.Ontario less than a couple hundred km apart except for 1 NGS in New Brunswick.
Tritium was also dumped in the ocean to observe water current 😂
How much of the Canadian trash was purchased by Trijicon and Mepro Light?
Hello, chemist!
Could you please explain, or at least give the right direction to understanding of process of discovering a matter's formula, evaluating it's structure? How do we know there's benzol ring there, how do we know the angles in methane molecule? Are these but assumptions?
sounds like more nations just need to build the type of reactors canada uses and make more of the stuff
Runway lights are a huge market for tritium.
My dad worked at the heavy water plants in Point Tupper and Glace Bay Nova Scotia
Howdy, love the video. You want another cool use for tritium? Rifle Optics. More specifically, the Trijicon acog.
how does tritium turn into helium? where does the second proton come from?
Considering that light water absorbing neutrons is basically a fusion reaction, does it release any energy of it's own?
Yes. The amount is small by nuclear reaction standards, about one percent the energy release of a fission.
After decay of Tritium and electron release there must be positively charged Helium atom. What happens to it? Where does it go ?
It goes nowhere. It stays in the ampoule
@@hantrio4327 Than it should either make some chemical bond or make the substance electricaly charged
@@shoutitallloud the electron also stays in the ampoule and
That's not right.
A Helium atom (like any noble gas in its column of the periodic table) is very good at grabbing and tightly holding on to its electrons. That is what makes them "noble" - i.e. chemically inert.
So, except in their extremely highly energetic form (e.g. where He nuclei - aka alpha particles - are themselves the by-product of nuclear FISSION of much heavier radioactive elements - not the case we're talking about here), they are NEVER ionized (I.e. can't be "positively charged").
What happens when a high-energy He nucleus loses enough energy to capture its full complement of two electrons, it will grab them from other atoms, usually by prying them away from nearby compounds (or larger atoms that hold onto them less strongly. That happens all the time in any number of chemical reactions.
Humm i'm french and we have lots of nuclear reactors here. Not of the same type we use regular water, but it still produces some tritium, i know because they regularly leak it XD . I wonder how dilute it is, maybe with those prices we will start extracting it here...
If you enrich it you're also going to be producing heavy water. So maybe you could set up some heavy water production plants at the nuclear powerplants, and use the waste water from the reactors as feedstock?
You should have gone to a gun store a looked for tritiated gun sights.
CANDU reactors are a gold mine as it were, even if they're only producing clean energy with natural uranium and heavy water! ;-) Seriously though the technology is woefully underused as a power source globally and really should be adopted by more nations as a third way alternative between American-European light water designs and those from the Eastern bloc with a mix of older graphite moderated and water-moderated designs...
I have Canadian dive watch by Marathon. Tritium tubes keep it glowing all night long.
Should have watched the video before I went and collected all my neighbour’s garbage and stored it in my garage. I made a few sales on Craigslist but none at $30,000 per gram. 😢
Part of these keychains will end up in waste that gets burned. I'm not a fan to sell it!
I agree dose is important.
Tritium has a 12.33 year half life. That makes it actually decay quite fast (not very fast but most of it should be gone within a century or so). What you should calculate is how many can you expect to be burned in a waste burning plant in one go (for one gram of tritium to escape, you need to burn 10000 of them), by how much this will increase the concentration of fast decaying atoms in the air (even with burning those 10000 in one go, I suspect, almost negligible) and how much this will contribute to increase the radiation in the area affected by the exhaust of the waste burning plant. And then ask yourself the question; do I ingest more radioactive material by eating that banana I just bought in the supermarket than inhaling a whiff of the 'magic' smoke...
@@jiriwichern I know... my last whole body scintillation scan showed way more banana counts than materials from chernobil. But the Chernobyl peak was visible above the background. And I was >1000km away.
A video involving ice, I thought it would be Dr Alex presenting the video
I stole it from her
Tritiym exit signs avail on Amazon....over 600 dollars!!
Should tap into Fukushima, plenty of Tritium there
The "hydrogens have been switched out for deuteriums"? Deuterium IS hydrogen. Tritium and Protium ARE Hydrogen.
As a trashy Canadian, I agree with this video, I am worth nhillion$ per oz 🤘🤘🤘
And tritium lume for watches is illegal in canada
haven't Canadians installed Candu reactors outside of Canada?
High end watches use tritium for dials
If I am not mistaken, heard that Japan is dumping tons of it into the ocean for free.
That was the Japanese government's fossil fuel tax income talking. Millions of tonnes of water, yes, but the contained tritium was, if I recall, 0.5 grams.
Just an comparison of how much actual radiation Japan is dumping into an entire OCEAN, it is similar to what Ontario "dumps" into 2 great lakes.
As we are all not glowing in the dark here, it is not a dangerous level.
A lower exposure than a commercial airline flight.
I have regularly windsurfed next to both of Lake Ontarios NPP. I am Still here.
At Pickering you can sometimes feel the discharged water as it is warmer.
The discharge water has tighter controls than many countries drinking water in fact.
the whole Fukushima filled up by tanks with thritium water. Not 100% thritium, of course, just a bit more than allowed limit, but millions tonns! For free, just take it out from Japan! Ooops. Useless, as its almost impossible to enrich thritium, only intentional produce it.
BTW thritium lights almost disappeared from market in recent years. 5 years ago thritium lights (keyrings, badges etc) were available in any Chinese ebay shop. Now - ooops, only very expensive versions in literally several shops. So my cat will continue to wear his nuclear navigation and parking lights up to his death, but next cat, in 15 years, when these lights decay too, will not get anything.
Canadians , approaching our energy future with a CANDU attitude
And I thought I can now just become millionaire just by immigrating to Canada and sweeping the streets there.
Fun video.
Pretty sure anything anti-matter is going to release something as it cancels on matter.
Canceling on matter requires interacting with matter, and neutrinos basically don't do that. Like, nuetrinos will pass straight through the whole planet without a single interaction with the matter inside, so neutrino interactions with the rest of the world are rare enough to be very nearly irrelevant.
great!
4:20 wait, Tritium can be produced in three ways? oh my god i'm going to be riiiiich!
🤣
Now Canadia can be proud. They are valuable 😂
Fun fact... candu in bahasa melayu is opium...😂😅
CANDU is special 👍
"a ton of energy"
Thanks for making this easy for idiots like me to understand
Gun guys and watch guys know all about tritium. Night sights and tool watch lume.
30k a gram is a rip off even in canada
Dude deuterium!!
soooooo Star Trek warp cores are powered by Canada?
As was always suspected
William Shatner (Captain Kirk) was born & raised in Montreal.
Was there ever an overtly Canadian character on Star Trek?
Now wondering how the prime directive would have been different if with a Canadian lens.
Nations were wiped out before Star Trek, but according to Memory Alpha most characters have unknown birthplaces, and none from Canada.
@@tristanridley1601 hm.. i thought to ask chatGPT.
"One notable example is Geordi La Forge, played by Canadian actor LeVar Burton in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Though La Forge’s specific nationality is not often highlighted, in an alternate timeline (from the novel The Buried Age), he is said to be Canadian, adding a layer of potential Canadian identity to the character."
i have not verified
Ever hear the story of how the Finish helped win WWII by destroying all of Hitler heavy water.
That hydro plant was in Norway.😉
I didn't know Justin Trudeau was a valuable export
Take him please, we don't want him.
Hey man, you forgot the other convenient source of Tritium. Some nice folks over in this little city called Fukushima was kind enough to release tons of it a few years back. It's all in this easy to access place called the Pacific ocean, which, according to my notes, is just west of here! :)
Actually, the release of tritium from Fukushima amounts to 0.06 grams per year, so you are off by a factor of tens of millions. This is also less than many other nuclear reactors release as part of their regular operations.
That is like saying that the 0,1% alcohol in some fruit juice or similar is equivalent to 100% grain alcohol. The news stories of "a bajillion tons of radioactive waste" are generally not mentioning that it would be like pouring a can of beer into a swimming pool and calling it an intoxicating drink.
Whatever small amount there was has decayed to half since then.
11:55 We finally learn or at least get a disclaimer that this is not an economics channel. Unsubscribed!
India has the most CANDU reactors
Deuterium= heavy water, used in making nuclear weapons.
NOPE! Tritium is though. You are a neutron shirt of being right.
The weapons need to be topped occasionally due to decay of the Tritium.
Cool
Wow. This video wasn't a disappointment
why would this video have been a disappointment?? this channel is great
We at Reactions feel pretty good about these two comments
Should've checked the Capitol building lol
"it weighs the same"
"it weighs twice as much as the other one"
choose one.
A neutron and a proton weigh roughly the same, therefore a nucleus with a proton and a neutron (deuterium) weighs roughly double a nucleus with just a proton (hydrogen).
❤❤
Soo.. even snakeoil fusion reactors need actual working nuclear power plants to function. And even if their dreams materialized, and we could scale up fusion and generate actual usable energy with it, we would also need to scale up the number of CANDU fission plants. Fusion is so hopeless.
Very well said.
think of it more like a science experiment with (potentially) much larger economic implications than CERN or LIGO or JWST. those also cost billions and have no product to speak of. the science of fusion is actually fairly settled afaik; it's all about getting the recipe right and engineering a setup that can reliably output saleable energy. once a prototype actually works, we might be able to completely phase out fossil fuels within a decade or two - those are some pretty great returns!
and btw, if fission is required as step one of a fusion process, it should still output wayyy more power per gram of fission fuel than what it currently does.
maybe but maybe not, there are other fusion fuels besides tritium
Did you forget that most fusion power plant designs have a blanket of lithium, specifically to absorb neutrons, thus making tritium?
@@placeholdername0000 yes
Trashium!
Can confirm, Canada is expensive trash
maird
So the atoms that weight double but the water is 10% heavier, my 5 year old calls bullshit.
Deuterium is roughly double the mass of hydrogen, but oxygen is almost 16x heavier, so doubling the mass of the hydrogen atoms doesn't have as huge an effect as you may expect.
Nice 👍👍
Considering that light water absorbing neutrons is basically a fusion reaction, does it release any energy of it's own?
light water to deuterium yes, deuterium to tritium no, but not enough to be relevant with the other effects around it