What is Left Over (Depleted Uranium)

you so you do enrichment and you do this so you can get that reactor fuel or maybe so you can get the bomb eteri what happens to the rest of it if I took six units care what that is kilograms pounds leaders whatever you want but natural uranium it has point seven percent uranium-235 I take those six units and I do my enrichment and I will end up with one unit that at 3.2 percent that's your reactor fuel but I'm also going to end up with five units where the uranium-235 is depleted this will be at 0.2 percent doesn't go down all the way and you can tell that this works because six times point seven four point two this is five times point two which is one plus three point two is four point two for every bit of reactor fuel I make I have five units of depleted uranium sitting around if I was going all the way to bomb production at 90% that number goes up dramatically it might be 50 units of depleted uranium sitting around so what do you do with all that depleted uranium it's been stored for many years and if we ever go to a breeder reactor cycle when we use u-238 as the fuel wow we've got all the fuel already that we need for many years but there's something else you can do with uranium 238 ever think about why our bullets made out of what they are think about this hmm well I know the police can use rubber bullets to break up protests not advisable I prefer the old water cannons or something but rubber bullets supposedly won't penetrate through your body make a bruise sort of like paintball maybe I want to be shot by one but it's made our rubber whereas if you made the tip of it out of lead very dense substance it'll kill you go right through your body if you make it out of uranium it's even denser even heavier than lead and there's a particular other aspect of uranium is that it has an exothermic chemical reaction when it strikes things like iron this means armor like three inches of steel that might be on the front shield of a tank is easy to penetrate if you have a bullet made out of uranium basically the uranium melts itself right through and you can blow up the tank so governments can make munitions out of uranium here are these twenty millimeter diameter anti-tank shells and you can see that these can be loaded in to some type of gun and now you have a wonderful anti-tank weapon because the armour on the tank will be penetrated by these slugs we've talked about uranium being radioactive not highly so but still so you may be concerned that after you use these munitions you have radioactive substances scattered around the battlefield and I can see that's a little bit concern but I have a more important concern that if I was fighting in a war and the other side had uranium tip bullets and I did not I wouldn't want to be on that other side war is messy you've got two groups of people trying to kill each other and if your country wants to win that war and not have your soldiers die you give them the best tool you can if that means you can destroy their tank and maybe there's going to be some pollution left in the ground well I'd rather destroy their tank than them having destroyed my tank with my people in it Wars always been messy heavy metal pollution from lead bullets occurs certainly as well and in most cases just a slug of uranium sticking in the ground is no worse than the fact that uranium was under the ground it's when that bullet gets vaporized when it hits something like the metal in the tank and then it goes into the vapor which could be breathed and indeed there are some health effects and our soldiers and I'm sure the other side soldiers as well had from ill effects of this geranium still if I were the soldier would rather have that than have had the other person's tank shoot and kill us what about the exploded depleted uranium that's left on the battlefield that years later someone has to live in well uranium is toxic the same level that lead is toxic people don't use lead pipes anymore because the water goes through them they pick up a little bit of lead they also generally don't use lead paint because again the paint chips you know you're in constant contact with them maybe kids eat them and so forth so you know eating lead is not a good idea keep in mind that's what all the other bullets that have always been used in every war are made of is lead uranium chemically has about the same toxology of that there is also the thing that uranium is radioactive but the half-life is four and a half billion years which is really really long so the radiological toxicity of it is actually fairly low so I have here some depleted uranium it's about as radioactive as the fossil it's actually a little less because remember the real short half-life stuff the uranium-235 is almost all gone it's only 0.2% and do not open this but if you actually want to see uranium right this is the form of uranium oxide you clearly don't want to go scoop up fragments of uranium bullets and eat them all right just like you wouldn't want to do that with lead bullets or with a ton of other stuff that's in the ground that you shouldn't eat studies have been done to see if the soldiers that have been exposed to this because explosions happen things get vaporized you end up breathing in probably some small amounts of uranium clearly some soldiers had fragments of bullets loved in their body it's always a good idea to get out bullet fragments no matter what they're made of and the Veterans Affairs Office in the United States government has studied this effect over time Gulf War Syndrome could that be due to depleted uranium and the answer is no Gulf War Syndrome is very real it's a post-traumatic stress disorder being in a war having people shoot at you having to kill other people it's extremely stressful I'll take anything away from those veterans they did what their country asked them to do and they should be well taken care of and uranium should certainly be studied but all the studies that have looked at it is this a result of the depleted uranium have shown that it's not even the World Health Organization not something connected to the United States did a detailed study on the effects of depleted uranium and found that's really no worse than all the other stuff you have on a battlefield so you will see places saying oh they're using this radiological horrible dirty bomb well I'll take a dirty bomb made out of depleted uranium any a complainer to a dirty bomb made out of extremely highly radioactive substances Wars not pretty our soldiers need to be well taken care of after such a traumatic type event blaming it all on depleted uranium is very short-sighted science tells us that that's not awkward [Music] you

Channel: Illinois EnergyProf

Views: 45,313

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Id: HlHF0xHI5JE

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Tue May 14 2019