What does it tell you how radioactive thorium is?

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

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

Twenty eight is almost thirty.

Yellowcake uranium, Mark.

Jump 238 complete.

Ulan Ude

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

Access parameter 833 and set it to 28

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

And let's make it to 238.

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

They had invested very heavily in an alternative technology, the plutonium fast breeder reactor based on solid fuels and turning abundant uranium 238 into plutonium 239 and then burning it in the reactor.

Uranium hexafluoride is a gas.

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

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

I get fourteen.

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.

Almost all of it will ultimately end up fissioning.

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.

Once you have verified the lamps are working correctly go back to setting 238 and change the value to ten or whatever value the customer would like for this setting

Once again, still, it goes into it zero times, because twenty three is smaller than twenty eight.

So eight was the largest number of times that the twenty eight could go into two hundred and thirty eight without being larger.

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.

Hardly at all. That's why it is still around. Uranium, two isotopes uranium 235, uranium 238 both of course are radioactive.

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.

Out of about a thousand kilograms, about 15 kilograms of plutonium 238 will be left over. This is good stuff.

Everybody was really excited about Curiosity, and that had this big plutonium battery on board that has plutonium 238, which actually has a higher specific activity than the low enriched uranium fuel of these molten salt reactors, which means that the effects would be negligible, because you launch it cold, and when it gets into space is where you actually activate this reactor.

In fact it's worthless for bombs.

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.

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.

So thirty goes into two hundred forty eight times, because three goes into twenty four eight times.