Getting to the Good Stuff (Uranium Enrichment) 

The best channel on youtube. I wish I had the money and availability to study under the scholarship of this amazing professor. Amazing channel sir, thank you.

This is my new favorite TRvid channel. This stuff is fascinating.

The way this prof explains is awesome. Love your videos on Nuclear Technology. I learned about CANDU reactors much better from your videos compared to Canadian schools 😊

The decades of study really show. Dude knows his stuff

Learned so much about nuclear and related issues. Always afraid of this after learning about chernobyl but found I had really no idea what happened or how this works. Thanks 👍

Moreover than his impressive knowledge of uranium enrichment, I am in all of his ability to write backwards flawlessly.

I’m rewatching this video after I visited a uranium enrichment plant for work. I love this stuff and I’m glad to work with it

I have no use for knowing half the info I have absorbed from this channel, but I want more.

Thanks for posting this! Very clear and understandable and stuff.

Hope everybody knows that we are on a watch list now. Watching videos on Uranium Enrichment 😂

Well, I would say this video is dynamite, but that seems a bit underpowered given the subject. Kudos, Professor. This is excellent content.

Sir I love your videos. They are really awesome!!

Thank you, Teacher! I was studying these for my exam and was lost because nobody explains the process right! I appreciate it very much!

🧐 Or, if you want to do it the dirty way, then you can use a graphite air cooled reactor (like in Sellafield / Windscale UK). Take your U238 and grind it into a fine powder, pack it into aluminium cartridges with fins for cooling, then slide hundreds of these cartridges into a graphite core (think of an RBMK but on its side). The neutron bombardment will slowly "breed" (see what I did there) U235 along with other fissile materials, short lived horrors like Cesium 137 and Iodine 131 etc. The reactor and the cartridges are constantly cooled by means of pumping huge volumes of air through the core. Once a certain amount of time passes and the fuel has become slightly enriched, you push new cartridges through the reactors face, pushing the enriched ones out the back and into a water tank. Here they can be collected and moved to external water tanks for roughly 90 days, to allow the short lived fissile materials to decay away. The fuel is then taken out of the cartridges and separated out into U238 & U235. Then you start the process again until you reach your desired quantity of fuel. This is an exceptionally dirty and potentially explosive way to enrich your fuel however. As the graphite will over time collect radiation and begin to heat up more and more, requiring additional cooling, or, you can allow the reactor to overheat and release the radiation in the form of a sudden burst of heat (known as a vigner release). But every time you do this, the next time the reactor will have to be taken to a higher temperature in order to burn off the radiation, eventually you will end up with a disaster. 🔥

Quite cool and informative - now it makes more sense. Thank you.

Enrichment by 1.5X is SCARY. I didn't know centrifuges were that high.

If I've calculated right, one needs mere 4-stage centrifuge to get to reactor-grade concentration and only 11-12 stage - to weapon-grade. Still on the photo we see hundreds of them. Perhaps they work in parallel because of low productivity. But if something works in parallel, it's easy to reconnect that in series.

I’ve heard people pronounce Iran as “eye-ran” and “ear-ahn” but I think this is the first time I’ve heard “eye-ron”. Great video still!

Btw, Brazil's clearly demonstrated its technological prowess by building working ultra centrifuges domestically. But US-sponsored lawfare stopped it in its tracks using the lame excuse it was to fight internal corruption.

informative and to the point. subscribed.

This is better explanation than my lectures

Is this guy writing backwards on a glass screen, or am I imagining things? Respect to the skill that takes

Great professor

Can you enrich other metals other than uranium, I'm not really interested in making enriched uranium but I am interested in finding out if the same kinds of Concepts will work to concentrate other metals like maybe gold

So that's why we use plutonium in most of our nuclear devices! It's easier to enrich it at 3%, put into a seed reactor, and make plutonium-239! Because now you have something that can be chemically separated and more easily enriched! Thank you!

You can actually get out this debt by providing other countries with better clean energy and to those worrying about what if it blows up while you try to extract it well there must be a chain reaction that's needs to start so without that reaction it's a deadline

Hey I've been watching all of your videos. If I'm ever in Illinois, I'll be sure to give you a bit of tuition for your lectures ;)

I saw stainless steel tanks on a flatbed trailer that were labeled fissile material uranium hexafloride. I was surprised but I guess it is allowed.

What he is going to say is basically these huge plants were trying to extract 238 (10% non useful stuff) and make it into 235 (90% good enrichment fuel uranium)

The 12 thumbs down came from Iranian students taking this course on-line.

The worry isn't about Iran getting the bomb. It's Iran getting the bomb and Israel immediately launching a nuclear first-strike against Iran that triggers Iran's proxies to attack Israel in response, throwing the entire region into a war that would cause an enormous spike in oil prices.

Oh dear. Running the calc back to when the Earth formed, gives me a figure of U-235 abundance of 24% This means that, way back when the Earth was new.... You could make a nuclear bomb using just blacksmith's tools! (supply your own blacksmith of course, not my fault life too so long to get going!) A simple barrel full of about 300-400kg of pure Pitchblende would not only approach criticality, but drop a second barrel on top of it and it should go supercritical!!! Kaboom. (or at least one monstrously nasty Fizzle)

If you over-enrich the U235 with a few too many refinement steps, couldn't the material undergo spontaneous fission and explode? How is the concentration measured?

Thorium molten salt reactor avoids all this with far less waste.

Iran has a nuclear reactor Doc, called the Bushehr plant. 1k megawatts soon to be 2k and eventually 3. They are a nuclear nation.

Half lives of that isotope is cut into so fourth and keeps going lower in that half-life span

Its better to just make U233 from cheap thorium in a LFTR breeder reactor

How did Enrico Fermi enrich his uranium for the Chicago Pile reactor?

That was good. Gave a thumbs up. Anybody bad mouth that guy make me mad. He is a scientist, leave him alone.

Or highly grade fuel instead of bomb material I can't change the man's explosion however he provided that rich source of fuel

too bad u cant bind an extra electron to one or the other, then ide say a mass driver would be better than a centrifuge. by adding magfeild resonance separataion you could force reject the u235 by mag repulsion while allowing the u238 to passthrough at velocity. also, the gravi sepiration would be much stronger in a particle accelerator than any centrifuge. u might not even need to bind the U to florine at all, using a mass driver like cern. at thoes power levels it wouldn't mater if it was a gas or not just mono molecule it first. ur standard methoid of refinement is outof date sad to say. a modified variant of cern would make a few grams in a matter of days, forget months or years. and thats without electromagnetic passthrough.

I wish isotopic nuclear materials were ubiquitous without some Walter Peck type bureaucratic restrictions since uranium 235 is an essential fuel for routine spaceflights.

If we could learn to manipulate gravity then enrichment would be easy.

Impressed by his ability to write backwards there. Wow

No it was a extra 3 nuetrons not protons which is why 235-238 subtract those numbers

If the Iranians to have a nuclear bomb, it would create so much problems for them, embargoes, sanctions, isolation etc that it makes sense for them to opt out. It is also unIslamic to attack non-combatants ie the women, children etc who perish in a nuclear attack. I do know for a fact that Iran needs a huge amount of energy for its industries and domestic needs.

What s to keep Iran from reprocessing the U238 into Pu239 once they have their reactors up and running. They wouldn't need to refine Uranium any more than 3%.

Little boy used average 80% enriched fuel. 90%+ is not required for weaponisation. Typically, the fuel for US weapons is 93.71%

What about U-233? Although not naturally occurring; still a very interesting and fissile isotope. Also, no enrichment needed; just breeding.

4:14 edited by the U.S government in order to retain nuclear secrets.

This seemed even more impressive when I realised he’s writing backwards on the glass.

Why not use heavy water as a moderator? Can use natural uranium i understand. Wouldn't it be easier to separate heavy water from light water than separate u235 from 238? NIH?

And if those countries also have nuclear weapons let them know what they really have in their hands

Assuming energy resources permanently run out, that is to say they are (finite), there is no point in killing each other - USA, N.Korea, Iran and so on, over finite resources because even if anyone emerges as the ultimate winner after killing off all other competitors, that winner will eventually be met with a resource depleted world, meaning they would in the end - after all that murderous struggle & victory, die too. Surely our intellect should enable us to see such an out come. Assuming that energy resources do not run out permanently - which it seems is the case, but rather there can be periodic shortages, we can do one of two things. Either we continue to kill each other using the resources we have accumulated, from sources that do not run out permanently - a completely and utterly wrong thing to do, to use up the very infinite resources to destroy ourselves, or use those very resources to find more resources there by mitigating the shortages. This choice has been open to us since the dawn of our existence and will always be until we wake up to it. If we assume that humanity has a half life of 100 million years, the point being it is much less than the half life of elements of Uranium or the sun (sources of energy), this means the human life will run out (extinct) way long before these energy source will do. So these energy resources are infinite with respect to the humans maximum life spun. It seems we are killing each other under the mistake that resources run out permanently which is not true. They are sometimes in short supply. It is smatter to use the resources to find more because it is endless. I hope we learn this and quickly change. Both war and peace require huge investments one is unquestionably better than the other. Finally evidently no energy resources have really permanently run out in the last 1000 years. There is only theoretical speculation that they could run out permanently based on a mono-intellectualism.

Now I am on a watch list

Two ways you can enrich 238 either turn it into a gas or spin it very fast

It is arrogant in the extreme for us to speak with concern over Iran's potential weapons program, when we have stacked unimaginably dangerous and destructive nuclear weapons around the globe like cordwood, and escalated an arms race that caused Russia to do the same. It is clear Iran is far more balanced and sane than the US. Check to see how many school shootings they had in the last ten years, for example. So, as far as Iran, it's Iran's business.

February 2023 - Iran has a 84% enriched Uranium, IAEA screwed it again

Only 3% is reactor fuel

Can you enrich gold?

about as tight as your average Hvac system lol.

Where do we get 1.0043 number from?

So enrichment actually is no enrichment at all. It is just separation.

I suggest all nuclear bombs be disabled since they have 90% u 235 they are literally loaded with the good stuff that's if they can do it but to be clear they just need to extract 235 and the nuclear weapons are disabled and we can actually use that source of uranium 235 without spending all this money on the process just one nuclear bomb has 90% of uranium 235 that's 90% not 3% which these reactors produce they are talking about uranium enrichment when their bombs are filled with them

I live about 15 minutes away from Oak Ridge, I always thought that it was Oakridge, I'm glad I'm only in High School.

Thanks to you, soon my homemade nuclear bomb will be ready, i want to be superpower in my district

thank you for teaching me how to make a nuclear bomb

Ah you want a nuclear reactor Iran... then how about a heavy water reactor that can use natural uranium.

Well the order that I'm watching the videos and the my downloaded video list is not available to anybody else and so my last comment was on a video unrelated to the video that was in the top of the screen in the Android TRvid app. But I caught the bug before, during this time and I exited from reply and went into I hope just getting to the good stuff video that I just watched comment list. I also hope that the error is only in the display of the two comments for two different videos a moment ago one on top of the other when I was actually about to comment on this third video but that seems unlikely. So I'm going to have to fix that at some point myself and I don't know how I'm going to get a bug report to TRvid but if the channel or could please understand what has happened when I said I finished watching the video in my prior comment I thought it was suspicious because I thought I had already finished watching the video when I made the prior, and of course I had it was just a different video and my last comment was likely the only comment I made on the entire video so my hypothesis which was speculation about why there were two comments there is apparently now in retrospect unknowingly not what I thought I was saying which was not speculation but obvious fact and since it's wrong it was an obvious fact and I hope my speculation is correct about what it in fact was in terms of being speculation as discussed. Now I used to joke with an electric utility Economist about the tubes that were seized being for swing sets not for the centrifuges and he laughed a lot at that joke but it's not any funnier for me now seeing that the centrifuges are for gas not for what I assumed them to be which is something other than gas spinning gases is something new to me and it seems to be a way to separate water vapor from Air. My understanding is that there is no reaction between the nitrogen and the oxygen in air and H2O molecule so you should be able to spin the air and my team spend a lot of time working out various techniques in terms of for example of vinyl record whether or not you would want to have the water be taken away from the oxygen and nitrogen by pushing it Downstream essentially as it spins and as the groove runs or not Downstream and whether you want the groove to be in the direction of the spin on the disc

no talk about laser separation

Trying to make a Metal Gear.

Aha! He is not leftie, they flipped the video to make the letters readable from our perspective, case solved!

Hello FBI, I'm harmlessly curious.

Is he writing in reverse 😳

Am I being explained how to make a nuclear bomb?

The real lack of moderation is not in reactor cores. It's in this comment section.

How come it is perfectly fine for USA, Israel, Russia, Pakistan, India, China and even North Korea to own nuclear weapons but there is so much fuss when Iran tries to enrich uranium?

Page 351 Douay Bible or Version = n an English translation of the Bible from the Vulgate by Catholic scholars at Douai, a city in N France, in 1610.

R_d I met 'and' and 'Dan' side by side in Rd issue Nov. 2017. What a coincidence. dan = and = & Rad. Red Rid Rod Rud+E

watch this before TRvid removes it!

But the Iranians have been open about their nuclear program and have allowed inspectors in to monitor their enrichment. So what is the problem..? Personally I don't think the Iranians are interested in a bomb as they have no territorial ambitions. They do have interests such as looking after the well being of their shia brethren in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Does this outweigh fighting a nuclear war..? Against cities, full of non combatants, women, children and the elderly?

#4

stuxxy

Of course the US trades with and provides aid to Pakistan, India and Israel who each have nuclear weapons and have not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel got its bomb grade uranium for its first nuclear weapons by stealing it in the 1960s from a US plant in Apollo, PA that made nuclear reactor fuel for the US Navy. To cover the theft, they had to use poor material handling accountability that left the plant as a Superfund site that US taxpayers had to pay to cleanup. It was the sloppy material accounting that made the Atomic Energy Commission suspicious. The CIA later obtained physical evidence from Israel that had the same isotopic signature as the missing uranium.

So much propaganda.