How to make Plutonium

this episode was made possible by Wix and will tell you more about them later in the episode that's a stainless steel container that has plutonium oxide so hopefully that stuff will see its way onto some spacecraft in the mid 2020 timeframe Brady has been to really amazing land where they're synthesizing plutonium and they're making the plutonium to power spacecraft spacecraft that go to really distant places far too far from the Sun to use solar cells so they need to use plutonium-238 which can generate heat through its radioactive decay and power the spacecraft the plutonium is made from neptunium the technical problem that has to be solved is that the neptunium is supplied to the Oakridge lab as a solution okay so this is where we convert the neptunium liquid solution it's in a nitric acid solution and we convert it to a solid that's low concentration of the neptunium in that it gets to be a really really dark green whenever it's very concentrated we'll put it in to this unit pump it through it essentially a rotary kiln that's in the other glovebox on the other side and that converts the Neptunian liquid solution to an oxide powder this is the automated pellet press right here it's gonna first clean this dye out has to be really really clean before we use it now it gets a little bit of lubricant and they'll come over and they'll sit in the center of the glovebox waiting for that solution to dry so it's just gonna sit there for about 45 seconds or so there you go sets the funnel down I'm just going to go pick up a vial so what's the pin the boat picked up that's neptunium oxide mixed with aluminum powder now it takes off the cap now it's going to dump down the powder into the funnel now it's gonna replace the cap on the vial and in a second it'll take the vial back and put it back in into the position that it pulled it out of you know occasionally there's a little bit of powder that's left in the top of the funnel so it's going to pick up a little tool and brush the powder into the guy that fat part of the unit is what we call the die and then the punch is on top and you'll see it put it punch into place shortly it's gonna come over and gets rid of the funnel first punch is gonna go sit inside now it's gonna pick up the whole human and go put it underneath the press and now start pressing and that'll start the same operation again for another die in punch set when you see here looking at this powder and what's being done here and knowing that some of this stuff's gonna end up in space is that pretty cool it's pretty cool yeah it's pretty cool it's pretty cool to be able to be part of the space program and be able to be contributing material and knowing that this material will be used for decades to come the automated process almost seems very human doesn't it like giving something a little shake and a little tap and the little habits that one might do in a lab explaining well I think the reason why the robot has been made to mimic a human is because we know what a human would do and we know what works if you were trying to do some really sophisticated new process you'd have to do endless experiments to see whether it works or not but we know that a little brush of the funnel or tap is going to work so it's easier to automate that than to reinvent some new process so we get a 52 pressed pellets and it's in a little transfer device we call a boat and that boat comes over and it sits in the center of this unit lay the extra pillows those are actual pellets that's got the Neptunia minute we've got four lasers that actually measure diameter and two different points on the pellet now it's just searching for the center of that pellet in just a vacuum device to pick that up it's measure the diameters now it goes sets it down now it's going to measure the length yep it's been approved so now it puts it into that cassette the pellets get put down into these little holes and there's 53 holes around the perimeter on both the inside the outside that holds enough pellets for one target we unload those next door and we just drop the pellets down into the target that's the whole process of building a target so for us the big deal with that we have here is the fact we're going from making about 40 to 50 targets a year to making it at least 200 a year and in it and then eventually we'll get another line on the other side of the room and we'll be making around 400 targets a year in order to make the production we need for four to supply NASA they want more and more and actually we think that going into the latter part of the next decade will probably yes to increase our production but that's something the way we talk to NASA about on a routine basis so it's it's a it's a program well you got a plan for the next 10 years you can't just plan what so you're gonna do tomorrow because by that time it's too late you can't do anything about it okay now we're going to what we call is the control room this is where we have heavenly shield and hot cells and that's how we work on the irradiated target safely so that we can simply make the plutonium and give it again give it some NASA after your aluminium and Neptunian oxide spends its 50 days baking in neutrons you've made a whole bunch of new plutonium yes but you've also made a lot of other stuff we don't want yeah a lot of fission products and this is where you do the chemistry yeah this is where we do the chemistry the radiation dose is just too high to handle in anything but a heavily shielded not cell this is four and a half feet of shielding it's a combination of lead glass and mineral oil lead glass to shield from the gammas intense gamma source and the mineral oil is used to shield for neutrons this oil veil oh yeah yeah we know like yeah that's liquid yeah so unless I punched a hole in that which I can't do a whole bunch of oil oil would come out yeah yeah all this equipment in here is used for the processing chemical processing we have a dissolve or the top of it is in the floor of that cubicle and you see all the pipes coming off of it so that's what we call the solver there's actually a an opening that's about say four to five inches in diameter that we take our targets and those are lowered into the dissolver we'll do about 20 or 30 targets at a time and dissolve the aluminum so using a sodium hydroxide solution and then once we dissolved all the aluminum we decant that get rid of all the liquid waste and then we come back and hit the actinides with concentrated nitric acid concentrated nitric acid will dissolve the actinides and that allows us to start doing the chemical processing to separate the plutonium and the neptunium from the fission products have we got some targets in there that we could take a look at yeah put some these guys do this yeah so what we've got over there is some targets that we use during our experimental program that's an actual target that we use if we were planning and processing it we'd cut off the top and the bottom because the top four inches and the bottom four inches are just aluminum and what we want is the neptunium oxide and plutonium oxide that's in the center of that target so we'd actually cut off the top and bottom and then put about 20 to 30 targets inside the dissolver and then pump the liquid sodium hydroxide in to start the dissolution process so each one of those targets is going to give us just under four grams of plutonium oxide as the product we have to run through around 400 of those a year in order to make enough material one thing that's kind of cool about the Neptune plutonium is they'll turn certain colors so if you see a color exiting - in the right way you're pretty confident that's working right so if using dark green going out your Neptune is going out if you see kind of a purplish or magenta color coming this other way you got your plutonium so it's you can visually kind of see what's going on which is kind of cool then we have a lot of ways we actually measure those concentrations to get very precise results what do you think when you see these people that have to work with something that's just so dangerous like does it give you chills well I find it exciting of course although the material is dangerous it's so well protected or they well protected from them it isn't dangerous but you always wonder what would go wrong and I think it's a really good lesson to us chemists about how you can do really quite dangerous experiments if you take the right precautions and have the right equipment accidents happen in chemistry when you use the wrong equipment or you don't take precautions can you run the arms bob or are you given I have no did you use to do it was it ever never never tried I my first chemistry experiment in a lab I we were a very complex separation and I had it in a little bottle and then as I was moving around that dumped the bottle on the ground and had to try to sweep it all up and I didn't get a very high grade on that test that experiment no that was not yeah I leave it to the experts yeah can't believe have like dead gentle you can be with that thing it's a stainless steel container that has plutonium oxide made in what we call our campaign 3 which we did last spring and so this material is going to be held in self until we get the capability to be able to ship it out to Los Alamos so hopefully that stuff will see its way onto some spacecraft in the mid 2020 timeframe I really liked how our guide was so excited and pleased that he was participating will be it indirectly in the space mission and I think it really demonstrates how even in really weird technological events like spacecraft going to Pluto underneath and backing it all is a chemist yeah this video was supported by Wix which also happens to be who we've used to make this new periodic videos website pretty nifty hey and here's a little sneak peek under the hood where we've used wix2 design make changes get things looking just right I have to say I've been really impressed by just how much control you have over a Wix site sure they have some templates to get you started lots of templates actually but there's no detail you can't fine tune and tweak to get it just how you want it no little Bell or whistle you can't add to get your site doing what you want it to do just imagine what the periodic table might have looked like if Dmitri Mendeleev had used Wix now to check them out yourself go to wix.com slash go slash periodic videos there's the address on the screen Wix comm slash go slash periodic videos and our thanks to Wix for supporting this episode and we convert about 10% of that neptunium to 37 to plutonium-238

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 904,167

Rating: 4.9390907 out of 5

Keywords: periodic, videos, chemistry

Id: -sh5XZo5wRE

Length: 11min 53sec (713 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/h1zchan]

So thats the thing that homer drops at the start of every simpsons episode

[u/OkCow1]

Thank you, I’ve been wondering on how to produce Plutonium for a long time now for personal projects.

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[u/_stib_]

Obligatory xkcd: https://www.xkcd.com/2115/

[u/[deleted]]

The Neptunium was sent to another DoE site for irradiation. I happened to be at the reactor while they were performing the irradiation. The reactor guys didnt mention that it was for NASA, but if it was, the Plutonium would likely be coming back to be made into an RTG.

[u/GiantWaterfall]

That video makes me realize exactly how dumb I am. Even the first third...watching that robot function. Man, its humbling tbh.

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[u/Zadalabarre]

What is the name of the guy in the opening scene, talking from his office room?

[u/[deleted]]

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