process in fusion as you're bringing those lightweight atomic nuclei, those isotopes together. Fission is the exact opposite, where you're taking the heaviest elements in the universe: uranium, plutonium, things that are so heavy and have so many internal protons and neutrons and electrons, that they're barely held together at all. They're fundamentally unstable or radioactive, and those elements are very close to falling apart. And as they do that, if you take a uranium 235 or a plutonium 239 nucleus, and you add
What happens in this case is a neutron-- that's what the n is, a small subatomic particle with no electric charge-- comes in and hits an isotope of uranium, uranium-235, the rare kind that is able to undergo this reaction. The uranium splits. It produces a bunch of radioactive stuff.
it's very well contained very small so it's a fairly small amount to deal with a lot of the existing nuclear reactors burn about 0.7% of kind of all uranium that exists there's two isotopes u-235 u-238 many of the advanced reactor designs can go upwards of you know close to 50% utilization which is a significant expansion as far as the uranium utilization and then also once you actually split that uranium in there
And it's great. It's a great kind of invention and we want to support those things, I just-- we shouldn't be giving them a lot of subsidies, I think. Uranium isn't a natural resource.
So it's really like a jumping off point for to do further research if you see something that's wrong. Uranium Resources-- this company would've turned a hypothetical $10,000 into $17.
They couldn't do it, even incrementally. Uranium is just dissolved in that molten salt.
They're pushing for infrastructure, and they're pushing for their own interest of raw materials. uranium mine to the Chinese, and they pushed that impression very far.
to give an homage to the Greek and Roman uh history that that that fills the skies. Uranus, the planet discovered by Hershel, is the only exception to this rule. The moons of Uranus are named for assorted characters, fictional characters in Shakespearean literature.
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?
and put these tube linings into the pipe, and boom, it works like magic, like a charm. The uranium hexafluoride was no match for this magic material. - As Gordon Fee, the manager of the nuclear weapons plant, put it, "There was never a substitute considered, as far as I know."
ore, but the ore has to be distilled so that you can get the tiny bits of uranium 235 you need for uh enriching the uranium for either nuclear reactors or bombgrade uranium. That's first none at esphon to gasify the ore so that when
last year last year, the United States suspected that Iran were very close to enriching uranium. They're at 60%. 60 already. If they get to 90%, they have a bomb.
uranium-235, the rare kind that is able to undergo this reaction. The uranium splits. It produces a bunch of radioactive stuff. It varies with individual reactions.
Here's a strip mining of coal. Whereas uranium, we mine about 60,000 tons a year-- much less. The nuclear difference also affects how much waste products we produce from these two kinds of power production.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn has long been perceived as planets with no doubts because they are all visible. Although Uranus and Neptune were discovered later, they are just two additional and people perceived them as planets without astronomical definition. Then Pluto was discovered in 1930 and that was when things became complicated. Until then, planets has patterns.
They couldn't do it, even incrementally. That uranium, when it absorbs a neutron in that blue arrow symbol, it becomes U-2-- I'm sorry.
Newton's laws. You factor that Newton's laws are good. Good out to Neptune. Good beyond Uranus. They work for Uranus. All right. Now they keep looking at the trajectory of Neptune now now the farthest most planet and they say h
- How many times do you need to shuffle a deck of cards to make them truly random? How much uranium does it take to build a nuclear bomb? How can you predict the next word in a sentence?
But luckily his employer, DuPont, they were actually working with the US Army on the Manhattan Project. So they were refining uranium and plutonium 'cause of course there's a World War II reference in a Veritasium video. You just have to have it.
those have been made in the primordial universe through super-supernova and Big Bang and the initial formation of the universe where matter was created. And so we dig those up. We dig up uranium, plutonium out of the ground. And in fact, most plutonium we make from uranium, and we can talk about how to enrich uranium if we want to go down that road. But that's how we get those molecules and nuclei. For fusion materials, hydrogenic species, or hydrogens are primordial in the universe. Also, only the most common things that are in
comes from other things around nuclear power. You have to enrich that uranium to put it in a plant. enrich that uranium to put it in a plant. And the plant's safe, but you had to enrich that uranium, but you had to enrich that uranium, and that is some of the problem. Or a plant is designed to run Or a plant is designed to run for a certain number of decades safely, but do we run it longer than that?
have a fission reaction, a primary, and that creates radiation that induces a fusion reaction with a small amount of fusion fuel that then boosts that uranium reaction again. And so most of the energy, in fact 90% of the energy in an H-bomb, is all still from the uranium reactions themselves. - Yeah, I think people call it a nuclear fusion bomb, a hydrogen bomb, but really it's still a nuclear fission bomb. It's just that
And fission was first shown by Lise Meitner who showed that a certain uranium, when you bombarded it with protons, broke into smaller pieces that were less than the uranium, right? So, some of that mass, that E=mc² energy, had escaped.
it spins in the centerfuge uh facilities at Natans and Ford, you can get the purity of the uranium 235. That's what we're talking about here when we say it's enriched. So when you did this 21 years of modeling these attacks, how did the model show
is. The whole point of this is not to destroy a building. It's to get at the 5% 20% 60% enriched uranium that's the material for bombs. And last May it was very clear they had the material for 16
- Chernobyl is on fire. And every atom of uranium is like a bullet penetrating everything in its path-- metal, concrete, flesh. Now Chernobyl holds over three trillion of these bullets.
He became an astronomer eventually. Neptune and Uranus were discovered by Europeans, although both of them are invisible. Pluto was the first planet that was discovered by an American and they did not want to miss the credit. Therefore, US finally set definition of the planet to include newly discovered objects as 10th and 11th planet.
--Dictator of Uranus.
You can see Uranus through this telescope.
And if the uranium was not decaying, it would have been absorbed up to here.
He started collecting uranium at abandoned mines.
And they spin uranium gas.
I think it's uranium hexafluoride gas.
It could be uranium enrichment centrifuges.
And the heavy uranium goes to the sides, and the light uranium stays in the center.
The geologists used the uranium series method to date those bones.
There's the uranium series method, which is based on the decay of uranium to different daughter isotopes.
You need highly enriched uranium or plutonium.
The type of uranium that is consumed in nuclear reactors is actually U-235, which is very rare in nature.
If you enrich uranium to about 3 to 5% or maybe 7% U-235, you've got reactor-grade uranium.
highly-enriched uranium to operate those research reactors.
was a uranium bomb.
weapons--the highly-enriched uranium--blend it down in Russia and we bought it.
in them and the uranium that they use.
yankees fans are from uranus amen to that just kidding the book is coming out in the spring of 2010 so look forward to
Now, a nuclear bomb works something like this. Say you have a core of uranium-235, then when a neutron hits a U-235 nucleus, the nucleus splits releasing energy and, crucially, two or three more neutrons.
wherein they shipped all of their enriched uranium stockpile out of the country to France to be transferred to fuel rods.
north middle. Right in the middle are a whole series of these nuclear sites. You have Sagad which is where the uranium ore actually comes from. They don't have to bring in ore. They have plenty of ore, but the ore has to be distilled so that you can get the tiny bits of uranium 235 you need for uh enriching
is our bombers would always be able to destroy the target, the industrial facility that was enriching the uranium. The problem always was, no matter uh which year we did this, you wouldn't be
Mother Nature does not use uranium for energy.