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

Jump 238 complete.

We're burning this extremely rare stuff and we're not burning the common stuff, the uranium 238 and the thorium. We're

And let's make it to 238.

Yellowcake uranium, Mark.

It's less than one percent of uranium, it's about 0.7 percent uranium.

That's what makes it that you cannot burn up uranium 238 in a thermal spectrum reactor like a water cooled reactor like a CANDU or like a water reactor.

Uranium hexafluoride is a gas.

Uranium tetrafluoride is in solution.

He is not protecting himself from the uranium, he's protecting the uranium from himself.

Next, go to setting 238 and set it to one

And then we get to uranium.

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

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.

It's going to stay in solution. But the uranium will come out as uranium hexafluoride, a gas.

And uranium 233 is being consumed but the neutrons from the fission are making new uranium 233.

It became uranium 233. Isn't that cool?

These lovely ladies are uranium fuel rods.

Large uranium reserves for nuclear fission still exist.

Then they said, Well, what can we do with all this junk uranium 238, the 99.3 percent of it? Well, Seaborg had already figured out you could expose it to neutrons, and you could make it into Plutonium.

Uranium is used in the production of nuclear power.

Here's the decay chain that uranium 232 is on.

like uranium, plutonium, and everything else when they decay.

So, uranium, which is very big, wants to split.

You wouldn't happen to have any uranium on you?

You're fissioning uranium 233, but you're making a new one.

This is a handful of these uranium oxide fuel pellets.

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.

Now What about thorium and uranium? Both are naturally occurring materials.

The uranium and plutonium took on a gas form to escape.

Uranium 233, if you hit it with a neutron it will fission.

And with current reactor technology we really don't have very much uranium.

And you have the uranium mining that you have to deal with.

The trade balance registered a surplus of 76 billion, with exports reaching 314 billion and imports 238 billion.

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.

Because I think it'll fission. I think it'll fission just like uranium 235.

Their major asset for developing nuclear weapons is the Natanz uranium enrichment facility.

It doesn't have anything to do, in specifics, with centrifuges, with uranium enrichment.

The radioactivities are mixture of Uranium and Plutonium used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

NASA is desperate for this stuff. Plutonium 238 is different than plutonium 239, the stuff we use in bombs.

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

We could use thorium about 200 times more efficiently than we're using uranium now.

They say to me, We're going to run out of uranium. I said, OK.

You've got this core fluid, a lithium beryilium salt, with uranium tetrafluoride in there.

So now, you've just refueled your core salt with uranium tetrafluoride. Cool trick, huh?