Yellowcake uranium, Mark.

Ulan Ude

What does it tell you how radioactive thorium is?

Now, let's say we were looking at uranium 235 as if it was its own thing.

You're continuously refueling your reactor, all the time. You're always refueling the core with new uranium 233.

Uranium hexafluoride is a gas.

They took natural uranium, and they separated those two isotopes, highly enriched it in uranium 235.

And chemically separating things is like a bazillion times easier than isotopically separating it.

So you can sit there and pound thorium with fluoride all you want. It's not going to change.

Seaborg says, OK, well, maybe we can do the same thing with Thorium. Maybe we can expose it to neutrons, and we can make it into uranium 233.

Their major asset for developing nuclear weapons is the Natanz uranium enrichment facility.

To replace the 10 terawatts the world currently generates from fossil fuels, would require 10,000 nuclear power plants.

And the problem with a traditional nuclear power plant like this is, you've got these rods that are clad in zirconium, and inside them are uranium dioxide fuel pellets.

So they started looking at it, and it turns out, no, it's a really bad idea, because as you made the uranium 233, you were always making uranium 232.

You hit the salt with fluorine gas, and what'll happen is... There's uranium tetrafluoride, four fluoride ions, and there's uranium hexafluoride, six fluoride ions.

This was a temperature of colossal magnitude.

I have made something new. Thorium did absorb the neutron.

I call it the decay because it's a natural fundamental decay

So, instead of worrying about them, you just take that. It's a great thing.

Plutonium has been found on site as a very fine powdery dust and another element called americium has been found in New England

You're on a billion, million dollar idea here.

Even with Unconventional gas, there may be a peak in global natural gas production by 2030.

Barack Obama We will also explore safer ways to use nuclear power.

That is me at the control panel of my fusion reactor.

And that's great because this is a neat trick.

A staggeringly impressive level of safety, even if there is physical damage to the reactor.

literally what we're doing with our nuclear energy sources today.

We can make about 500 to 600 million in electricity and another 50 or 60 million on the fission of the uranium 235.

Interestingly enough, they also do this with uranium and chromium, and various other toxic metals.

You know, one of the things that doesn't earn me a lot of friends is the notion when we talk about, Oh, so and so can't enrich uranium, I go, No offense, but who are we to tell anybody what they can do? I mean, uranium's uranium, and it's not exactly like we have a monopoly on the stuff.

It's just not nearly radioactive enough.

Let me talk about today's nuclear fuel, because that is common to both boiling water reactors, pressurized water reactors and CANDUs.

It doesn't have anything to do, in specifics, with centrifuges, with uranium enrichment.

And the other thing is, if you look at the photos there's an awful lot of rubble coming back down Now, that's fuel racks, fuel rods and pieces of uranium and plutonium

Mali is a major producer of gold, but recently it has been designated

One is the actual fission products that's what happens when you fission the stuff. Then there is what's called the transuranics.

luminosity densities by about the fact of 1,000 or more which is like between uranium and air.

The guy's got gloves on and it's easy to think he's got gloves on to protect him from the uranium oxide, but now that I've taught you about the true nature of radioactivity, you might go I'm not so sure that stuff's so dangerous after all, and you would be correct.

Look at plutonium, is that deep low two right there.

If they did, the regulatory commission would shut the gas plant down, same with coal.

China's ripping it up, China's building like 50 reactors right now.

You can run these off they're really hungry, they really like down blended weapons pits, so that's highly enriched uranium and weapons grade plutonium that's been down blended.

You take this stream of this blanket salt off and you put it in this fluoride volatility column.

Whoop! It's in solution now.

I want you to go back. Now I want you to hit it with a neutron and see if it will fission.