Going Nuclear Episode 7 - Plutonium Production
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- čas přidán 3. 02. 2019
- The final part of my original plan, covering how plutonium is made for use in weapons, collected and compiled from public sources, this covers the isotopes and how they're transformed by neutron bombardment and radioactive decay.
Thanks to / icbmdeputy for the Sandia Labs Shirt! - Věda a technologie
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.
"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.
I’m a nuclear engineer; your CZcams 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.
Can you help me with school homework that’s kinda complicated if you don’t mind?
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
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.
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.
You have no idea how much I love these large-scale simulations.
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
@@October-TE monkeys playing with it, and got what they wanted.
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!
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.
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...
Nuclear nerd and science nerd, you have made my day.
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
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.
This series is outstanding and even thought I found it 4 years later, I am glad I did.
This has been a fascinating series, Scott. Thanks for doing all the amazing research! Great presentation, as always. Fly Safe!
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.
This series is fantastic. Like always, Thank you.
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.
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
Scott, I am glad that you explained how much tender, loving care goes into making weapons of mass destruction😊
Always looking forward to another Going Nuclear. Fascinating every time.
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.
Thank you Scott for sharing all your knowledge with us, you really have the best videos.
So not only must one love the bomb, one must care for the bomb?
@Sheldon Robertson 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
Shoo, brony...
well, she is liable to go off spontaneously if not properly cared for.
Never look directly at Happy Fun Bomb.
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 >_>
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.
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.
I love you scott manley. I sit like a kid in awe at storytime in preschool whenever i watch your videos.
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.
One of the best videos on this topic. Thank you.
Scott, your work on the videos is exemplary!
such a great series! Thank You 🙏✌️
Great show - Very informative - Thanks for making
This was a great series, thank you!
Thank you Scott, excellent work.
Another awesome video Scott. I learned more in this video than most of my college classes. Wish I had you as a prof.
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!
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!?
Excellent videos by Scott Manley!
Fascinating stuff. Worth the watchlist worries!
such an atmosferic music.. i loved that!
Awesome! This series has been great.
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 live in Washington and one of my neighbors used to work at Hanford. He has some really cool stories it’s very interesting stuff
Was a bit worried this would never come out. Thanks for this series Scott, very interesting stuff
YAY! {[(THX)]} for [ *finally* ] concluding this series.
Awesome choice of background ambience too :)
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!"
Plutonium is just so phenomenally toxic and volatile... lovely stuff.
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.
Hooray! Love this series.
Loved the evil supergenius manner in which you signed off after mentioning the WMDs today Scott.
Scot and Curious Droid both going nuclear this week.
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
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
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.
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.
That's what I call SOLID info, bud!! Thanks so much.
Ahhh. My favorite Scott manley series returns.
love the sandia labs shirt I had a few of them from a friend of mine who worked protecting the labs
How could I have missed your channel... an oversite rectified.
Great video...
Excellent series Scott. Good to see a science based explanation rather than the hysterics you see in the media.
Thanks for the memories, since time at Hanford in the 80s
I'm on so many lists now, thanks to you and Cody 😂😂
I felt this should've ended more like "I'm Scott Manley, React Safe!"
Hooray! Now I can finish that project I've been working on in my shed...
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'm so glad, that I was able to sneak some technical bits about nuclear physics into my seminar work for a theatre seminar... I still wonder, how I even got into it 😂
Nice Video! I really like this series 👍
that pic of the guy holding thgat half ball gives me chills
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.
This is great - I also like the Sandia Corporation T-shirt.
Is Plutonium now a dwarf element?
Thank you Scott.
Greatest series ever
I love the new hair cut Scott! Keep up the good work.
Psst, would be lovely with links to the other parts in the series or at least the first one in the description 😉 greetings from a new subscriber! And whoa, so information dense, I could keep up for most of it but eyes glazed over at least once 😅
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?
I like your Sandia Labs shirt! I happen to be in the Albuquerque area.
Damn straight, you used the outro music I have come to love this time.
Very cool and informative. I'd love to see a video about application (bomb design) since there's a fair amount of old declassified stuff out there on wikipedia and such.
Love the sandia labs tee shirt. The real life black mesa.
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.
The old footage in this makes me feel like I understand what Twin Peaks Season 3 was about a little bit more.
I kinda expected you to say "I'm Scott Manley, nuke safe!" this time around
Ahh, something to digest with my eyes and ears while I stuff my face with late supper. ^^ Very good timing. :D
I love your plutonium shaped head Scot Manley.
Finally, the next part of the You're On A List Now series is out!
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.
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.
Sandia National Lab tee-shirt... Nice touch
3:29 - Air-cooled nuclear reactor: REALLY BAD IDEA.
Ask the brits about theirs! It was called Windscale. The entire history is insanely amazing and more horrifying than British rail.
Why? You'll never run short of air.
On the other hand, the opposite side of the density spectrum - metal coolants - proven to be equally troublesome. Water is truly a wonderful substance!
Sean McDonough
I mean, air-cooling seems nice in theory, because if you’re not using water, then there’s no risk of the water superheating and causing a hydrogen explosion. It’s just when you actually build them that you realize they’re a bad idea.
legolegs Moving air sure you can, if the fans go down.
The shirt fits nicely with the series
The Chigaco Pile is what I called the aftermath of my first deep dish pizza with extra anchovies and jalapenos
Anchovies on a pizza? I'd call that blasphemy
@@Ansset0 The Italians do it
3:30 I love how on that diagram there is something labelled as "experimental hole"
Noticed that too!