Fun fact about plutonium, chemically it acts like cerium, the stuff that makes ferrocerium cigarette lighter flint spark good. In fact you could make a ferroplutonium alloy and it would be a bit heavier, and spark a bit better, would also turn the smoke into a literal cancer stick.😲🤓
Some time after this video was made, the entire process was moved to Hanford and reassembled at the Plutonium Finishing Plant. The Finishing Plant was the last part of the Hanford Plutonium Production Facility to be shut down. It was also one of the most contaminated areas and took years to disassemble and decontaminate. With the exception of B reactor, all the reactor fuel preparation buildings, reactor areas, plutonium separation facilities and the finishing plant have all been torn down or sealed. The completion of the Waste Processing Facility and the removal of all materials in the underground tanks is the last step in cleaning up after thew Manhattan Project.
The need to do this remotely and at a distance really shows in the complexity of the machinery. All these chambers and viewing windows, how unusual! These engineers were absolutely genius in their designs. Also, I’ve read about two separate nuclear accidents involving a plutonium nitrate solution that went critical upon stirring in one of those precipitation vessels. (4:17) Apparently that “tornado-like shape” that forms when a liquid is being stirred vigorously is pretty efficient at lowering the critical mass of the plutonium solution. In both of the accidents, a blue flash of light was seen. One guy named Cecil Kelly started shouting “I’m burning up, I’m burning up!” And the energy released from the blue flash was enough to kill him...this stuff is the closest thing we have to magic!
Ok, I learned some stuff I want to share after first watching this video. When stirring a suspension with fissile material settled at the bottom, it's not the vortex causing criticality. Water or oil acts as a moderator, slowing prompt neutrons. A small amount of powdered plutonium at the bottom of a beaker of water may be perfectly stable. But if it is stirred, the fissile material is evenly distributed within the water or oil moderator, making the moderator far more effective. The effectiveness of the moderator makes the mass needed for criticality much lower. So one doesn't need the vortex, just the act of stirring and distributing the plutonium can result in criticality.
I worked at Hanford Westinghouse in the '80s and '90s, and I saw bits and pieces of similar processes going on. I was mostly in the 200 and 300 areas, but went to other portions of the Hanford site as well.
Seems they glaze over what happens to all the plutonium contaminated waste streams coming out of this (the Ca / F powder, the hydrogenperoxide fluid, the mg allow crucible, the gasket and lid). That's the stuff they just chucked in an open pit in the 1950s.
Calcium Fluoride is actually rather inert. It is used for making high refractive index optical glass. Hydrogen Fluoride is seriously nasty however - it is usually scrubbed by adding limestone. Anyone who has caught a whiff of it will recognise the smell caused by the corrosion of their nose lining.
I agree......I guess it is all more sophisticated these days, but to see how it was originally done is amazing. Thanks for posting -- a real snapshot in to nuclear history.
This is awesome, thanks! Just found this in a 1966 catalog and was happy to find it already digitized. Did you get it scanned from the National Archives?
@@aaronsmith8073 in this tyrannical police state invention and production are a crime. note i didn't say production of what. they'll make up something and charge you with attempt to manufacture.... they'd probably arrest Rube Goldberg if he wasn't dead
Believe it or not, plutonium is not very radioactive, and a rubber suit and filter mask is all the PPE you need really. The reason they have everything sealed up is because they are working with powders which are dusty, and some parts of this process must be performed under nitrogen gas, not exposed to oxygen, because it will react with the material. All of the equipment operated with a vacuum pump pulling nitrogen gas through, and the dust and particles were removed with HEPA filters. You could remove all the material from the product stream, open a cabinet with the vacuum pump running, and go in with a rubber suit and a filter mask. The danger is ingesting a particle or getting one stuck to your skin. The alpha radiation is completely blocked with a rubber suit.
The started with natural metal uranium in reactor B at Hanford, moderated with nuclear grade graphite. The giant pile they built there had a push through system for uranium fuel rods/slugs. They loaded the reactor with uranium fuel, and after a few weeks to a few months depending on where the fuel was located in the reactor it was removed. The neutron exposed fuel was pushed out the back of the reactor, dropping into a cooling pond, and a few weeks later they fished out the fuel slugs, chopped them into pieces, and dissolved them in boiling nitric acid. There is a classified organic process, actually a couple of them at least, that selectively pulls out uranium and plutonium from the acid solution, leaving all the radioactive nuclide fission products.
I still do not quite understand why the alpha particles readings would be changing during this reaction. Is this because PtH6 forms some bigger particles, and compared to more loose powder, it causes shielding? I do not get it.
@@movax20h Bro, in the PuF4, produced alpha particles can hit fluorine nuclei nearby, when calcium metal reduces PuF4 into metallic Pu, fluoride ions are transported away from plutonium, and thus produced alpha particles do not get to strike fluorine nuclei, thus neutron flux decrease.
I've witnessed a large-scale Helvetica Scenario unfold at a calcium refinery and it still haunts me... And some people still dismiss the safety concerns because it doesn't happen often. I too used to prank people using calcic image misplacement when I was younger but is the risk really worth it...?
@@wyliesdiesels4169 I thought plutonium was created from uranium. Ergo you will need uranium ore to make it? Almost all plutonium is effectively man-made.
It takes about a ton of good quality uranium ore to produce one kilogram of uranium metal. And it takes 1000 kilograms of uranium to produce 1 kilogram of plutonium. Assuming that button is a kilogram, it took 1000 tons of ore.
The longer the uranium is cooking the more plutonium is made U235 has 0.71 percent in uranium but when cooked for 24 months plutonium is produced at 0.8 percent per quantity of uranium. Fast breeder reactors were promising but using Nak as coolant had a habit of catching fire and also diffusing into the pressure vessel making it brittle. Using CO2 gas would be safer but all fast breeder reactors programs closed down due the above .
US research on breeder programs were discontinued primarily due to proliferation issues. While the technology is not particularly safe, the main issue is political, not scientific.@@romanchomenko2912
I found some pictures of some buttons next to a ruler - it looked like they were approximately 1.5 inches in diameter and I guessed 1/4 inch in thickness. Using 19.84 grams per cm^3 as the density of plutonium and assuming a perfect cylinder as the shape I get ~ 143.6 grams so your numbers sound right to me.
I would do some small scale plutonium chemistry😂 But since it's only made in nuclear reactors you have to ask the government, surely they will give it to you with no hesitation🙃
You mean the guy who ended up being acquitted of all charges except mishandling of classified data, and was then able to sue multiple organizations for $1.6 million for leaking his name out before any charges had even been filed? THAT Wen Ho Lee?
Imagine how many chemists and tinkerers were burned or poisoned or killed... just to figure out this production method that now seems fairly standardized and well trusted. It amazes me to think of all the trailblazer types when it comes to highly dangerous chemistry shit.
@@lajoswinkler perhaps not so much in the US but the graveyard around Ozyorsk, Chelyabinsk Oblast, Codenamed City 40, has quite a number of gravestones of young workers with RIP dated mid/late 1940s timeframe. Ozersk was the birthplace of the Soviet nuclear weapons program after the Second World War. ( hey! is the Pu ready Comrade? IDK, let me ta s t e...🤢🤮😵 )
Because the information contained in this video has been well known by everyone for decades. Nothing they can learn here that they didn't already know.
The critical mass used in the fat man bomb was the size of a small soccer ball around 4.5-5kg but the actual amount of Plutonium that fissioned to flatten Nagasaki was just 1g so a tiny tiny fraction of that button😮🤯
In the Fat man there was 6.2 kg Plutonium. Still subcritical without the Implosion technique. The uncompressed critical mass of Pu-239 would be around 10 kilograms.
As best I can figure, and you can check my numbers. The Fat Man used a critical mass of 6.19 kilogram, of which about 1 kilogram was consumed by fission producing a 21 kiloton yield. That would be about 16% of the fuel burned.
No. Uranium is made into UF6 (Uranium Hexafluoride) and as a gas they put that into a centrifuge the centrifuge rotating very fast so the UF6 with the higher U-235 content will appear near the edge of the centrifuge. After collecting the UF6 gas with the higher U-235 content they repeat this process multiple times to get even higher amounts of U-235. After that they separate the Uranium from the Flouride and it gets back to a solid state. Now you have your enriched uranium. The process is slightly different and more complicated if you want to make fuel rods for reactors, also they don't enrich it as much as for a bomb.
From the time Uranium is mined until it is useable (and whether or not you convert some to Plutonium), the energy used AND Cost is a net-net loss for the American Taxpayer.
Bombs of megaton capacity are literally millions of tons of tnt. The bombs are so powerfull, there is no other way for them to be created as powerful. They are expensive af, but the cost is the only way to have thise size of bombs.
@@charadremur333 Well, you didn't say where you live but if you believe what is published, only 2 nukes were detonated in anger (and they in the kiloton ranges) so I point out AGAIN : The cost to Taxpayers is too much and no one can explain why Russian Communism "deserved" a Cold War while Chinese Communism got good jobs and technology from the US, UK, etc.
There was a interview I watched where the guy was talking about how they cast the plutonium sphere and when they were pouring it they could see a light blue glow and they thought it was going to go critical but they finished the pour and everything was fine
