i barely passed chemistry in high school, so i admit i'm shocked at how much time i spend watching these totally fascinating periodicvideos! great work folks!
The decay sequence is: Uranium-238 to thorium-234 to protactinium-234 to Uranium-234 to thorium-230 to radium-226 to radon-222 to polonium-218 to lead-214 to bismuth-214 to polonium-214 to lead-210 to bismuth-210 to polonium-210 to lead-206 which is its final stable form.
How did I miss this even though I've been subscribed for a year? I love to see The Professor's sense of wonder at everything from balloons in low pressure to the color of Plutonium salts.
Wonderful lab, the colour of plutonium is certainly interesting, good to get rid of that cliché stigma about radioactive elements all being neon green haha.
Fantastic stuff! I love your videos. You make highly complex subjects not only accessible to the average man but you make them fun. You passion for the subject matter is infectious!!!
Wow The Professor was so happy & excited, like he was going to see the NUCLEAR lab! :D Amazing how every new thing you learn and see in chemistry makes you feel happy like a little kid. :)
It astound me every time i hear about nuclear waste containing a good amount of 239 Pu to be stored and locked away. Im really not into conspiracy things and I have a very mitigated oppinion upon nuclear energy, but let me be really sceptical about good intentions prevail on bad ones... Dont misunderstand me... Im not Telling doc is a liar, I respect him and love periodic videos. I cant wait to see whats next... Continue your good work ;-)
It's one of the idea they had. Drilling into the crust and injecting pressurized waste into the mantle. However, they also know there would be a risk of radioactive volcanic eruption. Like a normal volcanic eruption isn't deadly enough, make it spurt radioactive lava and ashes.
I agree with you, mannonc, that hydrogen is presently best viewed as a fuel, not an energy source. But I note that chemically the situation isn't so clear cut: turning methane into hydrogen could ideally take a little less then 15% the energy made available by turning the resulting hydrogen into water. The carbon could hopefully be captured as graphite and buried.
I was asking myself the same question. The only explaination i can think of is this one: If you have to deal with chemicals that are not dangerous per se, but dirt from the lab would disturb your reaction. Then a positive glove box would be a good way to protect your experiment.
I have recently been thinking about the properties of catalysts and was wondering if you could do a video on how a catalysts specifically functions and how to predict whether or not a certain compound will act as a catalyst in a reaction. Basically, I am curious about whether or not there is a correlation between the properties of a reaction and the properties of the catalyst being used. Please make a video on this.
They do, but even the best geiger counters can only tell you if something is radioactive, and not what is causing the radiation. For this the tool of choice is the Scintillation Dectector, which actually determines what element is giving off the radiation. This lets it differentiate for example between the K-40 naturally in your body and some Th-232 you really shouldn't have gotten your hands into!
The steam may be considered visual or sight pollution in some cases. There often are methods employed to prevent the steam condensing at the top and forming visible clouds.
They are likely forced to use a certain version of windows that the drivers and the software for the spectrometer work with. Many industrial applications still run on win 3.11 because the software was designed to run on it.
Yellowcake still the bestlooking. - Nuclear power still the best. It will break down to lead or smaller eventually, so best to take advantage of it, accelerate the process if necessary, no CO2 clouds.
The kid had his hand in the nuclear waste drum? Reminds me of a kid in my class in high school. We were being shown a beaker of hydrochloric acid and we were told it was corrosive, but we were also told it generated heat and to touch the bottom of the beaker... And this kid stuck his finger in the beaker itself.
/agree I live in Texas. A long drive is something VERY different for me. 5 hours just to get back to my hometown and that's not even halfway across the State. ;p
Good point! I don't think we can solve all of our energy needs that way, but it would be a helpful supplement and could provide a cheaper and cleaner way of generating hydrogen for use as a fuel.
Chemistry is such a fascinating realm in it's own right to be fair but being a scientist is much more than knowing the facts. To be a scientist, you must question everything and accept nothing. Only by doing things yourself can you really understand everything and performing even basic experiments, it really helps you view the universe in a whole new perspective. Seeing really is believing :)
Depends on your perspective. If you live on the mainland of a major continent then the UK is pretty small by comparison to that. Here in the US just the State of Texas is 696,241 square kilometers which is ~2.85 times the area of the entire UK and that's just the State I live in. Where I grew up if you wanted to go to the theater you had to drive at least 45 minutes to a bigger town that had one. ;p We didn't consider it a long drive.
Indeed it is. It tastes like a bullion-cube with the consistency of earwax. If would in fact be improved by adding some nuclear material to the mix, at best something emitting alpha particles. That would give sufficient reason not to eat the stuff.
Thorium isn't less efficient than plutonium production - it's just less efficient than the simple fission of U-235. Thorium-232 has a much larger capture cross section than uranium-238. U-233 thermal fission does produce fewer neutrons than Pu-238 fast fission - that distinction leading to the research preference for the IFR. The gammas from U-232 contamination is a benefit, in my opinion; it offers proliferation resistance, since it's harder to handle - but can be automated without a problem.
Oh, okay, lol. I thought you are saying the some linux have better securities than others. lol I have ubuntu installed on another partition, and you are definitely right about the ease of installation process.
Personally before I thought of radioactive as a radiation (i.e. non contact thing) and I feared it, because it could make other things radioactive and you wouldn't feel it. Now that I learn more and more about radioactive materials I'm less and less afraid of it. Mostly due to the fact that some radiation can be treated with merely washing your hands.
Hmmm.... the 'contamination' the Professor mentioned... if it's not possible to scrub the equipment and decontaminate it, wouldn't that severely complicate the chemistry being done? I'm always curious about purity in chemistry... it seems many reactions are quite tolerant to impurities, but I would expect purity to be extremely important in research settings. Do they have to go to pains to track the history of equipment to accurately record all chemicals involved in each experiment?
How do they get material in and out of the negative pressure glove boxes when there is a risk of contamination, either from radiation or biological hazards?
If it isn't hooked up to the 'net, doesn't have open USB ports (I know. Win95 doesn't have USB. It's just the idea), isn't part of a mission critical item, and is fully formatted and reinstalled every month, I don't see the problem. Even a Linux/Unix system in a mission critical application is normally wiped and reinstalled every now and then.
What would be the advantage of using a positive pressure glove box? Why not make them all negative pressure if you want to keeps stuff from getting out of the box?
Radioactive waste is very concentrated and can be dangerous. Yet the amount of radioactive waste created in generating power is dwarfed by the pollution and wastes generated by fossil fuels. To be quite honest on the whole, it's actually cleaner and safer. The key of course is proper management. There are also new reactors being designed which quite literally cannot have a meltdown because those conditions will stop the chain reaction instead of accelerating it.
DOCTOR STRANGELOVE IS REAL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! O_O !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH !!!
Honestly, after what happened in Fukushima, I don't trust the safety of any nuclear facility, much less the reactors. How dangerous would thorium be? How radioactive? Would it be have to be stored for all that time securely?
Not quite right. Thorium isn't fissile. If irradiated in a nuclear reactor, then it can be converted into uranium (like U238 is converted to Pu239) in a regular reactor. But the process of thorium irradiation is much less efficient and much more complicated. Additionally, the uranium produced by thorium irradiation (U233) is exceedingly radioactive and produces very strong gamma rays (by contrast plutonium is mildly radioactive and produces weak gamma) making very difficult to handle.
I also heard that a nuclear reactor is always being cooled down to keep it from meltdown where as a thorium power core needs to be kept hot to keep it from not operating, is that true?
You are incorrect in thinking lead starts as uranium. Also, when most isotopes decay, they arent potentially lethal. So thats why people are a bit upset about radioactive waste.
I have a question. I would like to know if chemical engineering is a good class to do in college, I really like chemistry, these videos helped me to love the periodic table, but i'm worried because I don't really like math and physics. Help me please ): sorry for the bad english, i'm brazillian.
People from the olden times would look at the world from the plane, and then would put all the buildings and roads on a paper piece. That way you knew what was where. They called the discovery "a map".
Sooo uh.... what happened to that kid with his arms in the radioactive drum?
i barely passed chemistry in high school, so i admit i'm shocked at how much time i spend watching these totally fascinating periodicvideos! great work folks!
"I'm not allowed to tell you where we're going" Description: We're at Sellafield
The decay sequence is:
Uranium-238 to thorium-234 to protactinium-234 to Uranium-234 to thorium-230 to radium-226 to radon-222 to polonium-218 to lead-214 to bismuth-214 to polonium-214 to lead-210 to bismuth-210 to polonium-210 to lead-206 which is its final stable form.
well, he kept his hands in his pockets for about ... 10 seconds :D
Those are some nice shoes, professor.
So if Steve, the "radioactive expert" bites you, do you gain the proportional strength of an expert?
1:30 So Brady basically invented "WHAT ARE THOSE?!" like three years ago.
At 0:29, I thought "Oh no, don't look at the map, put your hands on the wheel professor! Oh right, this is Britain.
4:03 You said you have to keep your hands in the pockets
Prof. Poliakoff sure is smart.
I am positively surprised to see this renewed focus on nuclear chemistry. Thanks periodic videos!
This is sooo awesome! I'm getting my Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry :)
How did I miss this even though I've been subscribed for a year? I love to see The Professor's sense of wonder at everything from balloons in low pressure to the color of Plutonium salts.
If that man was my connection to chemistry in the first place I would be a chemist :P
This has been the highlight of my day. Can't wait for the updated element videos.
0:08 You don't even have to tell us. The title of the video gives it away.
Wonderful lab, the colour of plutonium is certainly interesting, good to get rid of that cliché stigma about radioactive elements all being neon green haha.
"it's hard for me to keep my hands in my pocket"
2 seconds later...
Fantastic stuff! I love your videos. You make highly complex subjects not only accessible to the average man but you make them fun. You passion for the subject matter is infectious!!!
This Professor is one of the most sympathetic people i've ever seen. He's what you would call so "cute". I'm male by the way.
I love how the professor is always using his hands when speaking
it was a joke. the boy didnt follow the "hands in pockets" rule so they sarcastically put his hands in a drum labeled radioactive waste.
Beautiful just beautiful, I would love to see what goes on there.
"So you have to think of your experiments enormously more careful than..."
Goes back to lab in Nothingham...
Boom!
The Professor's hand gestures excites me just as much as the content of chemistry.
Is that a .... periodic table tie? :D
Wow The Professor was so happy & excited, like he was going to see the NUCLEAR lab! :D Amazing how every new thing you learn and see in chemistry makes you feel happy like a little kid. :)
THANKS PROFESSOR
That childhood visit to a nuclear facility must explain the professor's eye-catching hair style!
;-)
In my opinion thorium reactors are the future
No, professor's hair undergoes nuclear decay and still emits radioactive particles.
I still can't wait for your new Thorium video. I hope you get to look into LFTR when you do it!
Thx for posting this, great videos as always!
Yeah, he did NOT say it was an alien UFO, yet you're correcting him on it.
THAT'S EXACTLY THE POINT I WAS MAKING.
It astound me every time i hear about nuclear waste containing a good amount of 239 Pu to be stored and locked away. Im really not into conspiracy things and I have a very mitigated oppinion upon nuclear energy, but let me be really sceptical about good intentions prevail on bad ones...
Dont misunderstand me... Im not Telling doc is a liar, I respect him and love periodic videos. I cant wait to see whats next... Continue your good work ;-)
It's one of the idea they had. Drilling into the crust and injecting pressurized waste into the mantle. However, they also know there would be a risk of radioactive volcanic eruption. Like a normal volcanic eruption isn't deadly enough, make it spurt radioactive lava and ashes.
I agree with you, mannonc, that hydrogen is presently best viewed as a fuel, not an energy source. But I note that chemically the situation isn't so clear cut: turning methane into hydrogen could ideally take a little less then 15% the energy made available by turning the resulting hydrogen into water. The carbon could hopefully be captured as graphite and buried.
The professor's mysterious secret shoes...
I hope he could be my professor of Chemistry, of Math or any type of natural science!
I was asking myself the same question. The only explaination i can think of is this one: If you have to deal with chemicals that are not dangerous per se, but dirt from the lab would disturb your reaction. Then a positive glove box would be a good way to protect your experiment.
I couldn't do "hands in the pockets" and still talk about things. I admire you, professor.
There's a party in my glovebox and you're all invited.
I have recently been thinking about the properties of catalysts and was wondering if you could do a video on how a catalysts specifically functions and how to predict whether or not a certain compound will act as a catalyst in a reaction. Basically, I am curious about whether or not there is a correlation between the properties of a reaction and the properties of the catalyst being used. Please make a video on this.
They do, but even the best geiger counters can only tell you if something is radioactive, and not what is causing the radiation. For this the tool of choice is the Scintillation Dectector, which actually determines what element is giving off the radiation. This lets it differentiate for example between the K-40 naturally in your body and some Th-232 you really shouldn't have gotten your hands into!
The steam may be considered visual or sight pollution in some cases. There often are methods employed to prevent the steam condensing at the top and forming visible clouds.
Comparing radioactivity to Marmite! That just made my day. Now I'm even more keen to try it.
They are likely forced to use a certain version of windows that the drivers and the software for the spectrometer work with.
Many industrial applications still run on win 3.11 because the software was designed to run on it.
lol awesome video, love the story at the end lol! cant wait for those next elements.
I one visited an uranium enrichment factory in Almelo, Holland. Never been through so much security measures.
Yellowcake still the bestlooking.
-
Nuclear power still the best. It will break down to lead or smaller eventually, so best to take advantage of it, accelerate the process if necessary, no CO2 clouds.
I see the professor likes video games. No other reason to use a map than the feeling of being on a quest
The kid had his hand in the nuclear waste drum? Reminds me of a kid in my class in high school. We were being shown a beaker of hydrochloric acid and we were told it was corrosive, but we were also told it generated heat and to touch the bottom of the beaker... And this kid stuck his finger in the beaker itself.
/agree I live in Texas. A long drive is something VERY different for me. 5 hours just to get back to my hometown and that's not even halfway across the State. ;p
Good point! I don't think we can solve all of our energy needs that way, but it would be a helpful supplement and could provide a cheaper and cleaner way of generating hydrogen for use as a fuel.
Chemistry is such a fascinating realm in it's own right to be fair but being a scientist is much more than knowing the facts.
To be a scientist, you must question everything and accept nothing. Only by doing things yourself can you really understand everything and performing even basic experiments, it really helps you view the universe in a whole new perspective.
Seeing really is believing :)
Depends on your perspective. If you live on the mainland of a major continent then the UK is pretty small by comparison to that. Here in the US just the State of Texas is 696,241 square kilometers which is ~2.85 times the area of the entire UK and that's just the State I live in. Where I grew up if you wanted to go to the theater you had to drive at least 45 minutes to a bigger town that had one. ;p We didn't consider it a long drive.
Thank you for enlightening me... again. looking forward to the new Plutonium vid.
Finally we see some real plutonium!
Can you do a video showing that Plutonium 241 pellet inside a cloud chamber? I bet it would look amazing.
Indeed it is. It tastes like a bullion-cube with the consistency of earwax. If would in fact be improved by adding some nuclear material to the mix, at best something emitting alpha particles. That would give sufficient reason not to eat the stuff.
This video is awesome! One of the best yet!
Thorium isn't less efficient than plutonium production - it's just less efficient than the simple fission of U-235. Thorium-232 has a much larger capture cross section than uranium-238. U-233 thermal fission does produce fewer neutrons than Pu-238 fast fission - that distinction leading to the research preference for the IFR.
The gammas from U-232 contamination is a benefit, in my opinion; it offers proliferation resistance, since it's harder to handle - but can be automated without a problem.
He was probably the boy with his hands in the waste, that's why they have a mind of their own.
the doctor is adorable!
Oh, okay, lol. I thought you are saying the some linux have better securities than others. lol I have ubuntu installed on another partition, and you are definitely right about the ease of installation process.
Personally before I thought of radioactive as a radiation (i.e. non contact thing) and I feared it, because it could make other things radioactive and you wouldn't feel it.
Now that I learn more and more about radioactive materials I'm less and less afraid of it.
Mostly due to the fact that some radiation can be treated with merely washing your hands.
thanks for the tour!
Hmmm.... the 'contamination' the Professor mentioned... if it's not possible to scrub the equipment and decontaminate it, wouldn't that severely complicate the chemistry being done? I'm always curious about purity in chemistry... it seems many reactions are quite tolerant to impurities, but I would expect purity to be extremely important in research settings. Do they have to go to pains to track the history of equipment to accurately record all chemicals involved in each experiment?
How do they get material in and out of the negative pressure glove boxes when there is a risk of contamination, either from radiation or biological hazards?
What about lern(palladium),boron 11 fusion or even John Bedini's work?There's a certain status quo and it needs 2 change asap
lol.. "there was a big row".. I think that is a massive understatement
Can't wait for the new videos!
0:17 no, that didn't give me much of a clue, however the title of the video did pretty clearly :)
If it isn't hooked up to the 'net, doesn't have open USB ports (I know. Win95 doesn't have USB. It's just the idea), isn't part of a mission critical item, and is fully formatted and reinstalled every month, I don't see the problem. Even a Linux/Unix system in a mission critical application is normally wiped and reinstalled every now and then.
What would be the advantage of using a positive pressure glove box? Why not make them all negative pressure if you want to keeps stuff from getting out of the box?
Wouldn't it be funny if he'd come out of the lab all bald, saying "oh my... what an exiting day that was!"...
Radioactive waste is very concentrated and can be dangerous. Yet the amount of radioactive waste created in generating power is dwarfed by the pollution and wastes generated by fossil fuels. To be quite honest on the whole, it's actually cleaner and safer. The key of course is proper management. There are also new reactors being designed which quite literally cannot have a meltdown because those conditions will stop the chain reaction instead of accelerating it.
I remember visiting the nuclear visitors senter in wales when i was really young. in 2008 i visited chernobyl and pripyat
highly recommended
is it possible to overlay text with the chemical compounds as you talk about them so we can learn as we are watching? just an idea. :)
Not in the general case, because of the concept of critical mass. The surface to volume ratio must be smaller.
DOCTOR STRANGELOVE IS REAL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
O_O !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH !!!
You know what other sequence creates lead?
Big bang to lead-206
Decay is not the only way elements are created
How is the glass and gloves acceptable? Don't you need lead or something like that in between you and the objects radiating alpha particles?
Honestly, after what happened in Fukushima, I don't trust the safety of any nuclear facility, much less the reactors.
How dangerous would thorium be? How radioactive? Would it be have to be stored for all that time securely?
Ubuntu is actually quite nice, very easy to use.
I want to know how that row ended what sort of procedures did he have to go through
Not quite right. Thorium isn't fissile. If irradiated in a nuclear reactor, then it can be converted into uranium (like U238 is converted to Pu239) in a regular reactor. But the process of thorium irradiation is much less efficient and much more complicated.
Additionally, the uranium produced by thorium irradiation (U233) is exceedingly radioactive and produces very strong gamma rays (by contrast plutonium is mildly radioactive and produces weak gamma) making very difficult to handle.
how and where do they get the raw materials to do this kind of radioactive experiments?
Regarding glove-boxes.. why would any glove-box be positive pressure?
hahahaha the professor never fails to crack me up !
I also heard that a nuclear reactor is always being cooled down to keep it from meltdown where as a thorium power core needs to be kept hot to keep it from not operating, is that true?
You are incorrect in thinking lead starts as uranium.
Also, when most isotopes decay, they arent potentially lethal. So thats why people are a bit upset about radioactive waste.
What do we do with all that nuclear waste at the moment? Is it just kept somewhere until these folks figure out how to dispose of it safely?
What did the professor mean at the end, did they amputate the arm of the guy who broke the rule?
I have a question. I would like to know if chemical engineering is a good class to do in college, I really like chemistry, these videos helped me to love the periodic table, but i'm worried because I don't really like math and physics. Help me please ): sorry for the bad english, i'm brazillian.
You guys should do a video about the 2 new elements :)
What was that big coloured poster thing the Prof. was reading in the car?
0:14 He's a radioactive expert? I wouldn't stand so close to that expert!
People from the olden times would look at the world from the plane, and then would put all the buildings and roads on a paper piece. That way you knew what was where. They called the discovery "a map".