They probably didn't use thorium for power stations because it requires entirety of it to be new R&D, which costs at least tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds. With uranium, the R&D was already done for them because they are piggybacking off of the research done for military weaponry.

To use the so called "waste" for building bombs.

'Without exception, [thorium reactors] have never been commercially viable, nor do any of the intended new designs even remotely seem to be viable. Like all nuclear power production they rely on extensive taxpayer subsidies; the only difference is that with thorium and other breeder reactors these are of an order of magnitude greater, which is why no government has ever continued their funding.'

It would cost taxpayers money, you cant really justify buidling it when you already have something that does the job, the end.

Tantalizing. Lovely presentation but you left me hanging Bud.

Disadvantages of thorium over uranium ?

probably assumed a sphere with a perfect reflector?

@@jaikumar848 thorium isnt fissile

They got 400kg because that's the smallest amount of fissile material needed for a sustained nuclear reaction in uranium. ~Wiki~

@@huntercasey1019 thats definitely not the smallest amount of fissile material needed... but with a bare sphere with no moderator or reflector i would believe it

Plug walk

Fermi definitely deuced his pants

It Will Kill All

Nuclear engineer banoge kya

@@RoYal-xz5ch already an electrical engineer.. Power Generation is part of electrical engg

Good sir, i am going to pursue nuclear engineering in future. May you provide me some advice?

They probably didn't use thorium for power stations because it requires entirety of it to be new R&D, which costs at least tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds. With uranium, the R&D was already done for them because they are piggybacking off of the research done for military weaponry.

You are brazilian 👍🏻👍🏻

WE HAVE LARGEST RESERVE 🥱

Not from bangalore This is from INDIA 😊😊

Oh,that's actually pretty easy. It's like a syringe.You pull in hydraulic oil with it and once pressed out it goes thru a smaller diameter pipe which by the law of physics has increased pressure. To understand it easier take a sharp needle and blunt needle,if you try to penetrate something ofc you'd be penetrated by the sharp one because it has more pressure focused into a smaller area. That's how they work as well,you take a big metal cylinder that can hold lots of pressure and you add inside a hydraulic oil which is low in viscosity but veeery dense,you pump the bigger cyilinder and it pushes everything into a smaller one out which then you work with(bending or whatever you need a press for) To push the handle which moves the liquid around it's usually made with leverage by the same principle i explained before or an electro motor which pumps it. Hope i got it right,correct me if there's a guy who understands them a lot.

How do we know this?

@@ibnewton8951 The scientists based it on the explosive yield. The estimated 15 kt explosion equates to 1 kg of matter converted into energy. As the blast damage from the chemical explosives would be negligible, the blast therefore was caused by the conversion of mass into energy. Einstein was nice enough to provide us with the math on that one. :) EDIT: I goofed, see my follow up comment. I'm leaving this one because I'll admit when I'm wrong about something.

Argh, I misquoted. The energy release was from fission byproducts, not the conversion of mass into energy. 1 kg of mass converted directly into energy would yield over 20 megatons of blast. The amount of mass converted into energy in Little Boy was about 1 GRAM.

@@doggonemess1 And that's a perfect prespective of how insanely inefficient is the reactions we use on the living on converting the mass into energy. A combustion of Hydrogen & Oxygen to make water, which is practically one of the cleanest one, converts 0.000000001% of mass into heat energy. The Fission of Uranium converts 0.08%. The Fusion of Hydrogen to Helium converts 0.7%. source by minutesphysics.

@@dy7296 We need some antimatter reactors. Get that rate up to 100%. XD

Isn't that also because of heavy water has relatively high (gamma, n) reaction cross-section?

@@farqilion8747 I think you mean it has a low reaction cross-section. Protium has a high affinity for neutrons because it already has an unpaired proton, but the deuterium nucleus is already balanced. So fast neutrons from the reactions collide but do not get absorbed easily and instead transfer energy to the deuterium as heat, and the neutrons themselves are quickly slowed to the thermal range where they can be more easily captured by a uranium or plutonium nucleus, and cause fertilization or fission, depending on the element and isotope.

@@sethapex9670 Sure heavy water absorbs significantly less neutrons than regular one does. But what I meant is that cross-section for *(gamma, n)* (i.e. presence of photoneutrons in the core due to deuterium nuclei splitting by gamma rays generated by some of the fission products) is relatively high. And considering a relatively large amounts of heavy water in CANDU reactors, amount of additional neutrons is quite significant

@@farqilion8747 I've not heard of photoneutrons before now, but I just looked into it and I suppose it makes sense that that may be likely. The energy of those gamma photons would have to be pretty high though, since they're essentially causing fission in an element that should pretty much only be energetically capable of fusion and decay

we've been doing this for 20 years but people still think we never thought about it.

Not really I guess. Energy producted from the decay is only about 7% of what would generate during fission reaction. Besides, that's right after fission stops, and further this amount exponentially decreases over time

Not actually. Probably 7th or 8th.

Q; What's the definition of a true competitor? A: Someone who comes first and third in a jerk-off contest.

They probably didn't use thorium for power stations because it requires entirety of it to be new R&D, which costs at least tens of billions of dollars, if not hundreds. With uranium, the R&D was already done for them because they are piggybacking off of the research done for military weaponry.

Closed cycle (waste = new fuel) solves this

@@dmitrii336 Sadly there are no closed cycle nuclear sites operating today. Maybe the next generation will use this, but we still have thousands of tons of waste that cannot be processed except to store them in old leaking ponds or bury it deep underground and pray and hope for the best.

@@Greguk444 they're already in construction (Russian BREST fast-neutron for example) and I think will be quite common by mid century.