I do. The first one could lead to an accidental war, or a war by miscalculation. of fissile material. If he has that, the making of the bomb is not that difficult. We make it difficult.
They couldn't do it, even incrementally. another fissile material. So there's another avenue and has a technical reason why that's sort of convenient.
and others. And fusion happens up to iron. Iron is the magical point in between where lighter elements than iron fuse together, and heavier elements fission or are fissile and break apart and release energy. I think about and I look at that process in stars, in that our star is fundamentally an early stage star that's burning just hydrogens. But when it burns and does
the path between where things are today and commercialization for something that's a little more out of the box? Thorium is not a fissile material.
They couldn't do it, even incrementally. And that fissile material, in turn, fissions and generates heat and power in a reactor.
so you have a nuclear bomb. But uranium-235, the fissile fuel needed for the bombs was really hard to get. So one of the key questions was just how much of it do you need to build a bomb?
It can scatter off an atom and keep traveling, so that gives you an arrow going back to itself. It can leave the system or get absorbed by a non-fissile material, in which case it no longer takes part in the chain reaction, and so it ends its Markov chain, or it can strike another uranium-235 atom, triggering a fission event and releasing two or three more neutrons
They couldn't do it, even incrementally. can release neutrons when fissioned and promote 232 thorium to becomes fissile U-233.
reaction back in 1933. At the time where it was even not known whether uranium was fissile , in those days he had understood the concept. The story is a good one.
process in a nuclear fission reactor? - In a nuclear fission reactor, you put enough of this fissile material, uranium or plutonium, together such that as these unstable molecules, these unstable atoms crack open and break apart, they release heat, that the component parts of those are actually quite hot. And so not only are the component parts that the uranium breaks into, and it's a whole spectrum of different atoms and atomic nuclei,
fusion is a part of the process to make it more powerful, but you still need, like you said, the uranium fuel. So it's not accurate to think of it as a fusion bomb really. - And if you take away that fissile material, that nuclear fission reaction, the fusion reaction doesn't happen at all. In fact, researchers have over the decades tried to make an all fusion bomb and been very unsuccessful at it. The physics and the engineering don't support it can ever
That sounds apocryphal to me, but it does give you a sense of how common it is and what a dense and efficient source of energy it is. The other thing about thorium is that it's fertile, it's not fissile . What I mean by that is you can't cram a bunch of thorium into a small space and create a critical mass and start a spontaneous chain reaction.
are hot, but it also releases neutrons. It also releases more of these uncharged particles. more of these uncharged particles. And if you do it right, this fissile material will be next to other fissile material, this fissile material will be next to other fissile material, and so that neutron will then go and bombard another and so that neutron will then go and bombard another uranium nucleus, again opening that up and releasing uranium nucleus, again opening that up and releasing more heat and more of these neutrons.
nuclear engineer, we can build power plants now that are safe, that aren't going to have reactions. They use a fuel, uranium and plutonium, that can be used to make nuclear weapons. We know that if you take enough fissile material together, enough uranium and plutonium, put it in a small volume, that it will not just create a reaction, but it will create a supercritical reaction that will then continue and grow and release a tremendous amount of energy all at
- The question I would want to ask is, "What would you do if we could deliver for you low-cost, clean, industrial scale, tens or hundreds of megawatts of fusion power that's low-cost, clean, baseload and doesn't have the geopolitical consequences of uranium and plutonium, of fissile material, what would you do there? How would that change your view of the next 30 years?
I do. The first one could lead to an accidental war, or a war by miscalculation. The barrier today, the reason that hasn't happened today, is he doesn't have the 20 or 30 kilograms of fissile material.
I do. The first one could lead to an accidental war, or a war by miscalculation. the 50 heads of state, all of whom are focused on the question, what can we do to protect our fissile material better
They couldn't do it, even incrementally. And over a period of days, it decays, finally to become plutonium 239, which is a fissile material.