I Explored the World's First Nuclear Power Plant (and How It Works) - Smarter Every Day 306
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0:00 [Click] A third of the electricity in my house comes from nuclear power.
0:05 That's how this sign is lighting up.
0:07 There's a nuclear power plant down the road.
0:09 It's making the electricity flow through this gas, and it's lighting things up.
0:13 You know what else is powering?
0:14 These lights right here.
0:15 Today on Smarter Every Day,
0:16 we're going to start something that I've been wanting to do for oh so very long.
0:20 I just haven't done it because I've been
0:22 a little nervous because I want to get it right.
0:24 We're going to start the Smarter Every Day Deep Dive series into nuclear power.
0:30 I want to get this deep dive series right because
0:32 when people hear the term nuclear, it's a loaded term.
0:36 I mean, most people come to their awareness of the raw
0:39 physical power of atomic energy through knowledge of atomic weaponry.
0:43 We've rightfully been taught for years to fear these weapons.
0:48 What are you supposed to do when you see the flash?
0:50 Duck and cover.
0:53 Tony knows the bomb can explode any time of the year, day or night.
0:57 He's ready for it.
0:58 Duck and cover.
0:59 At Boy, Tony, that flash means act fast.
1:02 [D] In order to do this right,
1:04 I want to move from knowledge to understanding about how such
1:07 an incredibly powerful thing can be harnessed safely for the good of humanity.
1:12 So I think an appropriate place to start is the first place that ever happened.
1:17 EBR-1, the world's first nuclear power plant.
1:21 How did it work?
1:22 We're going to figure that out today,
1:23 and we're going to gain an understanding of nuclear power.
1:26 That's what I want to do with this deep dive series.
1:29 We're going to see people handling nuclear waste.
1:31 We're going to meet this long-haired guy
1:33 that's glass-blowing to measure temperatures inside nuclear reactors.
1:36 We're going to meet people that make this stuff happen,
1:39 and they're interesting, and they're smart,
1:41 and they're compelling, and I'm excited.
1:43 So here we go.
1:44 This is the first video of many of the nuclear
1:47 power deep dive series here on Smarter Every Day.
1:49 So make sure you're subscribed,
1:50 maybe even sign up for the email list because these videos are incredible.
1:55 I don't know if you know this, but there are 17
1:57 Department of Energy national labs all throughout country here in America.
2:01 These places do all kinds of incredible research that's
2:03 going to help us have a new clean power future,
2:06 and I'm really excited about that.
2:08 To get started, let's go to a very interesting place.
2:12 If you want to learn about nuclear reactors, the best place to do it is out here
2:16 in the middle of Idaho at a place called Idaho National Laboratory.
2:22 Let's go get smarter every day and learn about nuclear power.
2:25 [upbeat guitar riff] So about an hour outside of Idaho Falls,
2:33 Idaho, there's a building that was made in the '50s.
2:36 This is the home of EBR-1, Experimental Breeder Reactor 1.
2:40 And I went inside and met Andrew,
2:42 who's going to show us all about how EBR-1 worked.
2:45 Okay, here we are at EBR-1, and this is Andrew.
2:48 [A] Hello, folks.
2:49 [D] You're going to walk us around, right?
2:51 [A] Yeah, I suppose so.
2:52 I'm not sure, did you have any specific questions for me?
2:55 Do you want to just look around and take a look at everything?
2:57 [D] Yes, I do.
2:58 Ebr, what What does the EBR stand for?
3:01 [A] That's experimental breeder reactor 1.
3:03 We had breeder piles before this, but they weren't technically reactors.
3:07 This is the first real breeder reactor.
3:09 [D] What is a breeder reactor?
3:10 What does that mean?
3:11 [A] Ultimately, a breeder reactor is taking uranium-238,
3:14 bombarding it with fast neutrons to produce plutonium-239.
3:16 [D] Okay, don't freak out.
3:18 I know that was a lot of words,
3:19 but we are totally going to understand what he just said.
3:22 [A] It's best to start upstairs.
3:24 [D] Let's do it.
3:25 I'm following you.
3:25 This looks awesome, by the way.
3:27 [A] I mean, this place was built in two years, which is truely incredible.
3:31 I always joke with people who come through that I'm not
3:33 sure that we could build a shed in two years nowadays,
3:35 let alone a whole reactor.
3:36 [D] By the way, I just went to the restroom a minute ago,
3:39 and it just looks cool because you can...
3:42 I'm sorry, I'm going to do this.
3:44 You can see all of Idaho wilderness out there.
3:51 It looks awesome.
3:53 It's just a cool place.
3:55 The fonts are great.
3:57 I love it.
3:58 [A] I think we'll probably start in here just get a bit of a rundown of things.
4:01 [D] All right.
4:02 [A] This diagram helps me explain breeding just a little bit.
4:05 There are two isotopes of uranium that occur naturally, 235 and 238.
4:11 Uranium 235 is what's useful to us in a reactor.
4:14 That's an a unstable atom,
4:15 we can break it apart and harness the energy from that breaking.
4:18 Unfortunately, 99.
4:20 3% of uranium is 238, which is too stable to be split,
4:25 but you can use it to make plutonium.
4:27 What you have to do is separate the 235
4:30 from the 238 until you've got a concentrated amount,
4:32 and then you can build a breeder reactor.
4:35 [D] Now, so you're breeding plutonium?
4:36 [A] Yes, sir.
4:37 [D] So you're making plutonium?
4:38 [A] Mm-hmm.
4:39 [D] And that's what's actually giving you, ultimately, the electricity?
4:43 [A] Not in this case.
4:44 The uranium 235 is running double duty.
4:47 It splits.
4:48 In the process of splitting,
4:49 some of that mass has transformed directly into heat.
4:52 That's what we're going to use to make electricity like a coal-burning plant.
4:56 But it also releases neutrons, and we can use the excess fast neutrons
4:59 that aren't needed for splitting extra uranium to breed plutonium.
5:03 [D] Nuclear power is intimidating for people to understand, myself included.
5:07 As a result of that, I have spent a lot
5:09 of time with Flannel and googly eyes and 3D printing some stuff,
5:13 and we're going to take a stab at understanding this, okay so,
5:16 Andrew said there are two things going on at EBR-1.
5:19 He said there's heating, and he also said there's breathing.
5:23 These are two separate things.
5:25 Heeding is how we make the electricity.
5:27 Let's focus on that right now.
5:28 We'll talk about breeding later.
5:30 So how does a nuclear power plant, in this case, EBR-1, make heat?
5:34 Let's start with a very important atom.
5:37 It's uranium-235.
5:39 And in this little example here,
5:42 all the protons are red and the neutrons are blue.
5:45 I want to introduce you to Our Hero.
5:47 This is a fast neutron.
5:49 And when you see this fast neutron, I want you to think of this.
5:51 Wee Wee Wee!!
5:53 [Destin laughs] It's so silly, but this is what makes nuclear power possible.
5:58 So we've got this this fast neutron hitting uranium-235.
6:03 Now, one thing to remember about uranium-235 is it's
6:06 about 0.7% of all the uranium in the environment.
6:10 The rest of it, what is it?
6:13 99.3%.
6:13 Those are all different isotopes of uranium.
6:16 So when this fast neutron hits uranium-235, it's not like a billiard ball,
6:21 ballistically, like blowing up all the protons and neutrons.
6:25 It's a different thing.
6:26 It fundamentally changes the nature of this atom,
6:30 and it's no longer uranium-235, it turns in to uranium-236.
6:36 Now, I've got these different color googly eyes to represent
6:38 the fact that uranium-236 is a little bit different.
6:42 It's spicy.
6:43 So uranium-236 It's really deep on the periodic table.
6:46 There's a lot of forces at work.
6:48 It doesn't want to hold itself together.
6:50 It's not as stable as uranium-235.
6:53 So this exists for a very short amount of time,
6:55 and then something interesting happens.
6:57 It actually splits.
6:58 This is fission.
7:00 It splits the atom into two new atoms.
7:04 This is not a chemical reaction.
7:06 This is fission.
7:07 We are splitting that atom into two new atoms,
7:10 and they're very surprised to exist.
7:12 Of course, they are different atoms.
7:14 We've got krypton, and we've got barium.
7:17 So these new atoms exist.
7:19 But the act of splitting that atom has a byproduct that's very,
7:23 very important, and that is heat.
7:25 So I'm going to add heat to the board here.
7:27 So we've created two new atoms, and we've created all this heat.
7:32 And if we're clever, we can use that heat to create electricity.
7:38 But there's another thing that happens as well,
7:39 and it's going to take me just a second to get all my heat on the board here.
7:41 So we've got these new atoms.
7:44 We've got all this heat, but there's something else that happens.
7:47 We actually create three new fast neutrons,
7:51 or I guess they kick off of the fission.
7:53 So you've got these fast neutrons going off into space.
7:57 Wee, wee, wee.
7:58 They're just flying off.
7:59 So So everything you see on the board here was
8:03 in that uranium 235 atom when it was hit by one fast neutron.
8:08 So if you think about it,
8:09 we can think of that uranium 235 atom almost like a spring loaded mousetrap.
8:14 It's got potential energy, and it's stored up,
8:15 and it's even got these three extra fast neutrons over here.
8:19 And when you hit it, it'll spring off and it'll do crazy things.
8:23 So if we think about that, and then we cleverly arrange
8:27 a bunch more uranium U235 atoms out here around that initial fission event,
8:35 then we can do a really cool thing.
8:37 With that fast neutron that's kicking off the splitting of the atom,
8:40 it can go over here.
8:41 And if there's another U235 atom in the proximity,
8:44 it can slap it and trigger it,
8:47 and then you create this whole thing all over again,
8:49 creating heat and three more fast neutrons.
8:52 Wee wee wee!!
8:54 [mouse traps snapping] So by cleverly arranging U235 atoms around each other,
9:00 scientists and engineers can create more fast neutrons
9:04 from one fast neutron triggering a U235 atom.
9:08 It's almost like a bunch of mousetraps ready to go.
9:10 And if you cleverly arrange them, you can create heat at the rate that you want.
9:15 So by controlling the proximity or the probability of the interaction
9:19 of these fast neutrons with these other U235 atoms,
9:23 scientists and engineers can control how much heat
9:26 is created in the reactor, which is amazing.
9:29 We're going to learn more from Andrew as we learn more about the plant,
9:32 but I have some more felt stuff later
9:34 that has electric motors attached to the board,
9:36 and I think you're going to enjoy that.
9:38 What's your deal, Andrew?
9:39 Are you a student?
9:40 What's your deal, man?
9:41 I got to know.
9:43 [A] So I'm a mechanical engineering student.
9:44 I just have a deep love of history, so I wanted to work out here,
9:48 get some public outreach before I'm stuck behind a desk.
9:50 [D] You're not going to be stuck behind a desk being a mechanical engineer.
9:54 You're going to be building awesome things, man, like reactors.
9:57 [A] That's true.
9:58 I'm more meant just...
9:59 I get to I'll talk to people in interface with the public while
10:01 I'm out here because there's so many
10:03 misconceptions around this technology and its safety.
10:04 But this is the first reactor ever really made to produce electricity,
10:09 and it has a bunch of inbuilt safety
10:11 features that most people wouldn't have even expected.
10:14 [D] Is this how EBR That one worked?
10:15 [A] Yeah, essentially.
10:17 [D] So the reactor, and then that's liquid going through there.
10:22 [A] Yeah, it's a liquid metal.
10:23 It's a bit unique compared to most modern designs.
10:25 We used a mixture of sodium and potassium.
10:28 It's a liquid metal eutectic, which means if you get the right alloy,
10:31 it has a lower melting point than either of the base elements.
10:34 In this case, like mercury, it's liquid at room temperature.
10:37 They had to use a liquid metal because water absorbs and slows down neutrons,
10:40 and they needed fast neutrons to produce plutonium.
10:43 So they had to find a way to make the liquid metal work,
10:46 and that's why the system looks a bit weird.
10:48 Technically- [D] Yeah, it usually goes from here to here.
10:51 [A] Yeah.
10:51 [D] And you don't have this loop right here.
10:54 [A] Technically, to make this function, you wouldn't even need this middle loop,
10:58 but it's there for a pretty good reason.
11:00 If you were ever to have a breach between
11:02 these two pipe systems that allow the two coolants to mix,
11:04 you'd get a pretty big explosion.
11:06 The alkaline liquid metal will basically rip
11:09 the hydrogen off the oxygen in the H2O, so you do get an explosive reaction.
11:14 They would not want that to be highly radioactive.
11:16 So by splitting up the liquid metal loops this way,
11:19 the highly radioactive coolant is sequestered in this first loop.
11:22 That provides one level of safety.
11:24 There's a second level that exists in the secondary heat exchanger.
11:27 We'll talk about that downstairs.
11:28 [D] All right, Andrew did a great job explaining everything, but selfishly,
11:31 I just wanted to build it and play with it to understand it better.
11:34 So that's what we're going to do.
11:35 The first thing I want to talk about is the fact that they use liquid metal.
11:38 That's a pretty big deal.
11:39 So I purchased some Gallium,
11:41 which is a room temperature liquid metal that you can just buy and play with.
11:46 It's really fun to see a metal flow like a liquid.
11:49 But why did they do that?
11:51 That's a really strange design choice.
11:53 So the fast neutrons, when they kick off of a uranium 235 atom,
11:57 those things are going 14,000 kilometers per second.
12:01 Very, very fast.
12:03 The thing about fast neutrons is when they go through water, they slow down.
12:07 So if you have just water like this, there's a bunch of hydrogen atoms in there,
12:12 and that fast neutron will interact with them, and it'll slow down to 2 km/s.
12:17 That's not good if you want to use this as a breeder reactor,
12:21 which is what they wanted to do.
12:22 So there's this other material called NAK, sodium and potassium.
12:25 You can see how it gets its name right here,
12:29 NA for sodium, K for NAK is not a moderator like that.
12:33 So the fast neutrons will just zip through
12:36 this, and it's also a really good conductor of heat.
12:39 So it makes an ideal liquid to transfer heat away from the reactor.
12:43 So the first two loops in EBR-1 were NAK, and the third loop was water.
12:49 Now, just like Andrew said,
12:51 that first loop is isolated from the second loop so that if you
12:56 did have NAK come in contact with water because that doesn't work well,
12:59 it It'll explode if that happens.
13:01 If you have an explosion, you don't want it to be a radioactive explosion.
13:04 So you isolate all the radioactive stuff over here in loop one.
13:08 And then, well, let's just see,
13:10 how do we get heat from the reactor all the way over there?
13:13 So let's look inside of our loops here.
13:15 You see, there's our reactor.
13:16 That's just a heat exchanger.
13:18 That's a heat exchanger with some steam in it.
13:20 Okay, so let's look at how this works.
13:22 So I've got this little setup here.
13:24 I've got a little distribution panel so I can turn things on and off.
13:27 I've got a bunch of motors and stuff behind the board there.
13:31 I'm going to show you how this works.
13:32 So first of all, let's turn our reactor on.
13:34 I'm going to take this and move it up,
13:36 and we'll understand why that turns the reactor on later.
13:40 So our reactor is now running, and we are creating heat inside the reactor.
13:46 The problem is if we just keep making heat over
13:48 and over and over and never do anything with it,
13:50 it'll just sit there and melt everything down.
13:53 So we have to move the heat away from the reactor.
13:56 And the way we do that is with NAK.
13:57 So we're going to turn this little pump on here,
14:00 and we're going to pump NAK through the system through this heat exchanger.
14:04 So that gets us to the second loop.
14:07 So the interface between loop one and loop
14:10 two is basically a pipe within a pipe.
14:12 That's a heat exchanger.
14:14 So there mechanically isolated from a fluid perspective,
14:17 but they're not thermally isolated.
14:19 They're actually thermally coupled.
14:21 Pipe within a pipe, that's a heat exchanger.
14:23 And once we get here, we can just simply turn on another pump here
14:26 and we can pump the heat over to the third loop.
14:29 Now, the The third loop is important because we have water in there.
14:34 When you heat up water past a certain point, as you know, you make steam.
14:39 That steam can be converted to mechanical power.
14:43 We're going to take thermal power move it all the way down
14:46 and convert it to mechanical power by activating this turbine right here.
14:51 At that point right there,
14:53 we can use that to turn a generator and all kinds of things like that.
14:56 As the steam goes through the turbine, it loses energy,
15:00 and we can condense it back into water, and we can send it back into the loop.
15:05 We can just use this loop right here over and over and over.
15:09 And if we hook a generator up right there, we can actually create electricity.
15:15 So that's what we're going to do right now.
15:16 Let's hook up our...
15:19 Let's just hook up those wires.
15:20 And there we have it.
15:22 Light.
15:22 We have done it.
15:23 We've created the world's first nuclear power plant.
15:27 We've gone from nuclear power, thermal energy all the way to electricity.
15:32 This is the world's first nuclear power plant, EBR-1.
15:36 And remember, this is a fast reactor.
15:38 There's two types of reactors, a fast reactor, which uses fast neutrons,
15:43 or a thermal reactor, which uses a moderator which slows down the neutrons.
15:48 That's not what EBR-1 was.
15:50 And the reason they wanted a fast reactor is because of the breathing process,
15:54 which we'll learn more about later from Andrew.
15:56 But now that we know how all this works, let's go learn how they controlled it.
16:01 [A] All right, let's take a look at the control room next.
16:03 [D] I love your tour style, Andrew.
16:07 It's great.
16:08 You've refined it, haven't you?
16:09 [A] Yeah, I've had a bit of practice out here.
16:11 [Destin laughs] [D] All right.
16:13 Is this control room?
16:14 [A] Yeah, this is the control room.
16:15 [D] Is this where originally, this is the original control room?
16:19 [A] Yeah, essentially everything in here is original.
16:22 There are a couple of pipe systems I've noticed throughout
16:24 the building that changed as they updated the reactor core,
16:26 but that's basically it.
16:27 Everything else is in the position it had It started in the '50s.
16:31 Primary coolant was metal.
16:32 [A] Yep.
16:34 [D] All of this these are measuring the temperature.
16:38 [A] I love these paper graphs.
16:40 They measure time radially,
16:42 so 24 hours is a full circle and amplitude is measure from inside out.
16:46 It's so simple and beautiful,
16:47 and it makes perfect sense if they had to switch these out every day.
16:50 [D] Yeah.
16:51 Do you have any of the old blanks?
16:53 [A] I don't know if we do or not.
16:54 I'm sure that they exist somewhere, but I don't have access to them.
16:57 Okay, so here is an actual drawing.
17:02 Yeah, you can see it.
17:03 It's pretty cool.
17:05 Oh, midnight right there.
17:06 Midnight.
17:06 So what time is it right now?
17:08 It is 2: 30-ish.
17:10 So midnight would go 2: 30.
17:11 So right here, that is the temperature at that time.
17:17 I just don't know how to measure it.
17:19 Okay.
17:20 [A] Yeah, they're a bit hard to read,
17:22 but there is something really nice about these old systems.
17:24 I've had some old nuke's come through,
17:26 and they tell me that with this very analog of recording data,
17:30 it can be really intuitive for the human brain
17:33 because you can look at the circle and see
17:35 what portions of the data are larger or smaller
17:37 as far as amplitude goes and read it very quickly.
17:40 In a modern digital system, you'll have maybe a catalog of 10,000
17:44 entries for whatever the amplitude is you're recording.
17:47 And oftentimes, that's harder to understand for the human
17:50 brain than looking at something like this.
17:51 You can pick trends out a lot quicker with this.
17:54 [D] Okay, this is unrelated to nuclear power, but I think you'll enjoy it.
17:57 So I am working on my PhD, and and as a part of the PhD,
18:00 I'm trying to do what's called modeling and simulation
18:03 of an event that I did back in the day.
18:06 Two objects clashing together at a very high rate of speed.
18:09 It's really fascinating.
18:10 But what I'm trying to do is I'm
18:13 trying to create a digital version of that event,
18:15 and then I'm going to do what's called finite element analysis.
18:18 Basically, I take the objects and I divide them up into little finite elements.
18:25 And then when you do that, you can calculate the forces going
18:28 in one of the triangles and then the force is going out,
18:31 except it's in three-dimensional space.
18:33 And then you can use that data to go back and you can measure with math,
18:39 you can measure the stress all along the impact surface of these objects.
18:43 Now, I'm doing this on a computer, which I want to go show you now.
18:47 So let's go in there and check that out.
18:49 Okay, this is my workstation.
18:50 It's a special computer made by Puget Systems to run very complicated software.
18:55 This is a piece of software called Ellis's Dina.
18:57 Actually, this is Ansys, and I'm running LS Dina simulation on it.
19:02 Now, the thing is, I can only run this simulation on this machine,
19:06 and it takes a really long time to run the math.
19:09 So today's sponsor is AnyDesk,
19:12 which is remote desktop software for your computer,
19:15 and you can check it out at anydesk.com/smarter.
19:19 Anydesk is fantastic and easy to use
19:21 software that lets you remotely control computers.
19:24 You can do it from a laptop or you can do it from your phone.
19:27 So recently, I had to travel up to the northeast, and while I was there,
19:30 every chance I got, I wanted to check
19:32 in on my simulation to see how it was doing.
19:35 On this train, I can tether with my phone
19:37 and I can remote in to my workstation back at home,
19:40 and I can check on the simulation to see how it's running.
19:43 I love it.
19:44 Any desk has changed my life.
19:46 I think there's something to be said for studying in a really
19:48 cool room or doing some work in a really cool place,
19:51 which is why I'm here at the New York Public Library.
19:54 I'm able to run my workstation from a remote location
19:57 and work on my PhD in a really cool room.
19:59 I I know that sounds dumb, but it's really cool and I enjoy it.
20:03 You should check out AnyDesk.
20:05 In fact, the screen capture that you're looking at on the screen right now,
20:09 I uploaded that back to my workstation, back home using AnyDesk.
20:13 There's a file sharing system built into AnyDesk.
20:16 I love AnyDesk.
20:17 It's seamless, easy to use, and it lets me do complex stuff like this remotely.
20:22 Anydesk.
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20:37 Check it out.
20:38 Anydesk.
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20:39 That's the data.
20:40 It looks pretty cool.
20:42 Thanks for considering.
20:43 This is amazing.
20:45 This is incredible.
20:48 They hand-calibrated.
20:53 [A] You'll see these notes all throughout the facility.
20:56 Basically, every system, they were learning for the first time.
20:58 So as they figured out how to it, they'd write notes so that the next person
21:01 to do it basically had a baseline to work from.
21:05 [D] This is incredible.
21:06 What they're doing is they're calibrating.
21:08 They have an analog measurement here and tank level in inches.
21:14 This is a curve.
21:15 And so this is how to read this.
21:17 If I said I've got two amps, I would say two amps.
21:21 Oh, that is 30, 35 inches is how much fuel is
21:28 in my tank or whatever this What is in your tank?
21:31 Primary drain tank.
21:33 Okay, I appreciate this so much.
21:37 I used to do instrumentation, and one of the first things we would do
21:40 is we have to make the curve for your instrument,
21:44 and you set the low-end and the high-end,
21:45 and then you figure out how it all works.
21:48 I've never seen that technique, and it's awesome.
21:51 I'm sorry.
21:52 That was a little too much geeking out there, Andrew.
21:55 [A] Believe me, I'm all for it.
21:56 [Destin laughs] [D] That's awesome.
21:59 [A] Then there's one particularly important button I always like to talk about,
22:03 and that is, of course, the Scram button.
22:05 If I press this while the reactor was operational,
22:07 it would be shut down in about four seconds.
22:10 From the beginning of these reactor designs,
22:12 they knew they had to be shut down quickly if the power
22:15 was rising quicker than they could really ameliorate it in another sense.
22:19 This system has two different ways of scramming.
22:22 One of them would insert the control rods all
22:24 the way and it would slow it down over time,
22:26 and then it was ready to start up immediately.
22:28 The other Scram system, which was, I think, pulled from this bully here,
22:32 would drop the outside blanket immediately decreasing the reactivity to zero,
22:36 and that would shut it down immediately.
22:37 The only problem is they could not start back up quickly.
22:41 They'd have to go through a process of making sure the blanket was good to go.
22:44 Took about an hour before they could fully restart it.
22:46 [D] That's a serious scram.
22:48 This is the more graceful scram, and then this is the, Oh, heck.
22:57 Let's grab that ring and pull it.
22:59 [A] It used down a lot further, but kids thought it was fun to swing on.
23:02 [D] Oh, yes, it goes up.
23:03 Oh, that's interesting.
23:04 It's in the middle of the room, so anybody could pull it.
23:06 [A] Yeah.
23:07 [D] Okay.
23:08 I could spend too much time in here.
23:10 Should we go to the next place?
23:12 Time to talk about breeding.
23:14 Now, reading is a very special thing.
23:17 We can make nuclear fuel from nuclear fuel,
23:21 and it starts with a uranium-238 atom.
23:25 You remember when we were talking about uranium-235,
23:28 this is about 0.7% of all the uranium you'll find in the world,
23:33 whereas uranium-238 is more prevalent.
23:35 It's about 99.3%.
23:38 Now, when we did the fission thing earlier
23:40 and we kicked off these little fast neutrons,
23:42 when a fast neutron comes in contact,
23:44 wee, with uranium-238, that creates uranium-239.
23:52 You can tell from his eyes that he's just a little bit spicy, right?
23:55 So the uranium-239 exists for a while, but then about 23 minutes later,
24:02 give or take, we have a really interesting thing that happens.
24:05 We kick off an electron,
24:07 and we have this process called beta decay that happens inside the atom.
24:11 Some neutrons and protons, they'd switch rolls.
24:15 It's strange.
24:16 And then we end up creating,
24:18 as a result of this beta decay, neptunium-239, completely different element.
24:24 You can tell he's very different.
24:26 So after this time, we have another beta decay event.
24:30 That beta decay event happens around 2-3 days later.
24:35 We kick off one more electron.
24:37 We have some stuff happen in the nucleus again.
24:39 And then we create the ultimate spicy element,
24:43 which is plutonium 239 that comes into existence.
24:48 Now, the thing about this process is
24:51 you're making nuclear fuel from nuclear fuel.
24:55 And in fact, you can make more atoms of plutonium
24:58 239 than put in to begin with of uranium 235,
25:02 which is a very special trait for a nuclear reactor to have.
25:06 In order to do all this, you have to get a fast
25:08 neutron to hit the nucleus of a U238 atom, so it becomes U239.
25:13 But that doesn't happen all the time.
25:15 Sometimes these fast neutrons bounce off,
25:17 and the engineers and scientists that designed
25:19 EBR-1 used that to actually run the reactor.
25:23 It was pretty interesting what they did.
25:25 [A] Let's head out this door and see the reactor itself.
25:27 [D] What?
25:29 [A] Very close by.
25:32 [D] This is it?
25:34 [A] Yep.
25:36 It doesn't look like much, but this is a relatively small reactor.
25:41 So right now we're standing on the radiation shield for the reactor.
25:44 I would call it a containment vessel, but technically they're a bit different.
25:47 Containment vessels are essentially meant to hold
25:50 in the products if they have a meltdown.
25:52 This is just a big radiation shield.
25:54 Normally, there'd also be a big plug right here
25:56 that would prevent radiation from coming out of the core.
25:58 But now that it's been decommissioned,
25:59 they can safely take that plug out and let us look inside.
26:02 The core itself is just below that machinery.
26:05 We'd feed fuel rods into it through that machinery,
26:07 and the core is set up using these hexagonal assemblies.
26:10 The center seven contain the uranium 235 that's propagating the chain reaction,
26:15 while the outside ring of hexagonal assemblies contains 238 to breed plutonium.
26:21 There's not uranium in all 10 feet of these rods.
26:24 It's only in the eight and a half inch heat zone near the bottom,
26:26 about a football-size zone.
26:28 That's where all that reaction would take place.
26:30 For this particular reactor, they operated using about 60 kilograms of fuel,
26:35 and that means that there wasn't enough for it to go critical by itself.
26:39 That's why this outside breeding blanket was necessary.
26:42 It acted as essentially a reflector.
26:44 It's made of 84 bricks of uranium-238.
26:47 They're set up in this cup shape on an elevator just below the reactor core.
26:52 The hydraulic elevator would bring that up around
26:53 the core when it was ready to turn on.
26:56 It'll reflect neutrons back inside and give you
26:58 enough neutron flux for the reaction to occur.
27:00 So we didn't use control rods for startup and shutdown.
27:02 We use this for startup and shutdown.
27:05 [D] That blanket.
27:06 Okay, remember our board with all the stuff on it?
27:08 I'm going to put you on this tripod right here so we
27:11 can look at how to start up and shut down the reactor.
27:14 All right, so let's check it out.
27:16 So as we raise the blanket, we start the nuclear reaction.
27:20 And to stop the reaction, we just drop the blanket.
27:23 That's how this works.
27:24 So we have a physical control now for nuclear power,
27:29 and that's how they came with that.
27:30 And to explain what exactly is going on there,
27:33 I'm going to have to change out the board to the other board.
27:36 So let me do that now.
27:38 Okay, let's build the reactor from the top down.
27:41 So over here on the right, this is the top down view of the reactor.
27:45 The red is U235 enriched.
27:48 The outside is U238.
27:50 Over here, we've got the U235 atom and the U238.
27:54 So this is like the conceptual model.
27:56 This is the top down view of the reactor.
27:58 So let's look at how this works.
27:59 So So when we get a fission event from U235,
28:03 we're kicking off those three neutrons, right?
28:06 Those three fast neutrons.
28:07 Wee, wee, wee!!
28:08 They're flying out here.
28:10 They're going really fast, right?
28:11 Sometimes they will interact with the U238, and you might get breeding.
28:15 So if you look at over here, that would be leaving U235 and interacting
28:19 with the U238 atoms out here in this inner blanket, they call it, right?
28:24 So when it does that, sometimes it'll create plutonium,
28:27 sometimes it'll bounce it back into the U235 to sustain the fission reaction.
28:33 However, because of the arrangement, sometimes these neutrons,
28:36 they don't hit anything and they just keep going.
28:39 That's what the blanket is for.
28:40 If we were to put a neutron mirror,
28:42 let's think about it like that right there, there.
28:45 And on the top down view like that, then this is what happens.
28:49 So if the fast neutron flies, it misses the U238 and it keeps going
28:55 and it hits this big wall of U238 atoms, right?
29:00 These bricks of U238, it hits this wall, it reflects, then it will bounce back,
29:05 and that increases the statistical probability
29:08 that it's going to hit a U235 atom.
29:11 So your chances of sustaining a fission reaction goes way
29:15 up because you're getting two shots with those neutrons, right?
29:18 Well, maybe not two because some of them just keep going, but you get the idea.
29:22 So it leaves the inner core.
29:23 It goes past the inner breathing blanket,
29:26 which is cooled by liquid metal, NAK, if you recall.
29:29 And then it goes out to the outer breathing blanket,
29:32 and then it sometimes will bounce back into the core.
29:35 That's why applying...
29:37 If I did this, then it's very unlikely that it's going to bounce back.
29:41 But if I did this, then we're going to bounce neutrons back into the core.
29:44 That's why raising and lowering the breeding blanket is so important,
29:48 and that's why they could turn on and off the reaction.
29:51 If they balance the amount of U238 and where
29:54 it is and how many neutrons can go where,
29:56 they can just flip a switch and turn on or off the reactor,
30:00 which is fascinating.
30:02 That would come up and down?
30:03 [A] Yep.
30:04 Originally, they had it set up so it can only be fully up or fully down,
30:08 but they realized that that wasn't ideal,
30:09 so they added in some hydraulic control systems so you can get more fine-tuning.
30:13 This is also where our control rods would go into.
30:16 We did have eight control rods,
30:17 but they'd go into the outside blanket for fine-tuning.
30:19 As the reactivity of these rods decreases over the nine-month lifespan,
30:23 they'd pull the control rod so they could get the same power out.
30:26 [D] The outer blanket would move up and down?
30:28 [A] Yes, sir.
30:29 [D] If comes up, what happens?
30:31 [A] If you bring it up, it'll increase reactivity until eventually you
30:35 reach criticality and the reaction starts.
30:37 [D] Because it's reflecting neutrons back in towards the fuel?
30:40 [A] Yep.
30:40 This is also breeding plutonium.
30:42 That's why it was made of uranium-238.
30:44 [D] Okay.
30:45 You have to lift it in order for it to activate, and so gravity is your friend.
30:51 Yep, and that's why our Scram system works in an incredibly simple way.
30:54 When they scram this facility, rather than dropping control rods into the core,
30:58 which is how it works for almost all modern facilities,
31:00 it'll empty the hydraulic systems that hold the breeding
31:03 blanket up and drop that down into the basement.
31:05 [D] So it just opens a valve?
31:06 [A] Yep.
31:07 [D] Okay.
31:08 [A] That would shut it down in about four seconds,
31:09 but it would take an hour to restart if they scrammed it that way.
31:12 That's why they had two separate scram systems.
31:15 [D] Are these actual fuel rod assemblies?
31:18 [A] I think these are just mock-up assemblies and rods,
31:20 but they are all exactly the size of the originals.
31:24 [D] That's cool.
31:26 And there was fluid in there, I'm assuming.
31:28 Was there water?
31:29 [A] Not water.
31:30 This would be the liquid metal cool part of the system.
31:33 Right up here on top under the plug, there would be a layer of argon gas.
31:37 That would prevent oxygen from ever getting down into the coolant.
31:40 It could ignite the coolant if it comes into contact with air due to the oxygen.
31:43 This would be filled with of Argon,
31:45 and there's argon in a couple of other systems that we'll see as well.
31:48 [D] Is argon heavier than air?
31:50 [A] Yeah, I believe so.
31:52 For the case of argon,
31:54 it acts essentially as a noble gas that's completely non-reactive.
31:57 That way, you won't have anything reactive come into contact with the coolant.
32:00 [D] That's awesome.
32:01 That's cool.
32:02 Where to now, Andrew?
32:04 [A] All right, let's go take a look at the generator where
32:06 they powered the first light bulbs to ever be powered using nuclear energy.
32:10 [D] Look at this.
32:11 That's not actually true right now, is it?
32:13 [A] Not anymore.
32:14 [D] So that was true at the time, though, right?
32:16 [A] Yeah, and it was also a huge point of pride to the men working here.
32:19 It's important to remember that they had just come from the Manhattan Project,
32:22 meaning their work had recently been used in Japan
32:24 to kill thousands of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
32:27 Whether or not it was the right choice to drop that bomb
32:29 is not that I ever pretend to know or tell people.
32:32 That's not really something I can decide because I wasn't there at the time.
32:35 [D] Come on, Andrew.
32:36 I'm putting all of that on you.
32:37 [A] But really, they cared about producing power.
32:40 They knew this could be an energy future for the world,
32:42 and it mattered to them that they were on the other side of that coin.
32:45 That sign was a point of pride because of that.
32:47 From what I understand,
32:48 they would never turn that sign on unless the reactor was producing electricity,
32:51 and they would shut that off before they shut the reactor down every night.
32:54 They really did care about that being true.
32:56 They cared about it.
32:58 [D] That's awesome.
32:59 It was It's almost like plowshares.
33:02 You're familiar with the verse in the Bible
33:04 beating their swords in the plowshares?
33:05 Have you heard of that?
33:06 [A] Swords to plowshares.
33:07 [D] Yeah, the plowshares project.
33:09 That was a whole different thing for people.
33:13 That's great.
33:15 [A] All right, next we'll head out to the generator.
33:18 A reactor only has one job.
33:20 In the case of BBR-1, it's got two to produce both heat and plutonium.
33:25 Through our heat exchange system, we boil water.
33:28 We send the superheated steam up through the back of turbine to spin it up.
33:31 Then through this Gearbox,
33:32 the generator spun up even faster to produce electricity.
33:35 [D] This is the Gearbox?
33:36 [A] Yes, sir.
33:37 [D] Okay.
33:38 [A] On the 20th of December 1951,
33:40 for the first time, they had all their systems in place.
33:43 They had been turning on the reactor since about August,
33:45 but they were finally ready to make electricity.
33:48 On that first day, Dr.
33:49 Walter Zinn, the lead for the project, wanted to start small,
33:52 so he just strung up four 300 Watt light bulbs,
33:55 connected those to the generator,
33:56 and when they turned the reactor on for the first
33:59 time to produce electricity using uranium for the first time,
34:01 they just powered on four light bulbs.
34:04 The next day, they connected it to the rest of the facility,
34:06 and it would power the whole building going forward.
34:09 [D] That's amazing.
34:09 But this was the moment?
34:10 [A] Yep.
34:11 [D] Is this a photo of the moment?
34:12 [A] Yep.
34:13 [D] Really?
34:14 [A] Afterwards, Reed Cameron thought
34:16 that they needed to commemorate the occasion.
34:18 So he got out a ladder and some chalk.
34:20 He wrote this excerpt up on the wall,
34:21 and everybody signed their names underneath it to commemorate the event.
34:24 [D] That's the original?
34:25 [A] Yep.
34:26 They encased it pretty soon after they signed.
34:28 [D] Electricity was first generated here
34:30 from atomic energy on December 20th, 1951.
34:33 On December 21st, 1951,
34:34 all the electrical power in the building was supplied from atomic energy.
34:39 Those present, and those are all the people that participated.
34:44 [A] Jolly signed a few days later.
34:46 He was the local janitor.
34:48 [D] Jolly did?
34:49 [A] Yup, that's the name on the bottom there.
34:51 But I think everybody else signed that first day.
34:53 [D] That is a moment.
34:55 What is the picture?
34:56 [A] Reid thought it looked boring, so he got back up there.
35:00 He drew the character blowing air on top.
35:02 Nobody knows exactly what it is,
35:04 but literature and some of the memoirs from the men who worked
35:08 here is that they figure it's the devil blowing air, creating energy.
35:12 Personally, it seems like their way of saying this thing that's been
35:16 used as a horrible weapon can also be used to create power.
35:19 But I can't attribute that to anything in specific.
35:21 That's more of a me thing.
35:23 [D] That's awesome.
35:24 This would have been powered with water.
35:26 Where are the heat exchangers that take the heat
35:28 out of the liquid and turn into water?
35:30 [A] We'll see those next.
35:31 They're right below us.
35:32 [D] Okay, let's do it.
35:33 You guys are filling up.
35:34 A lot of people are visiting.
35:35 [A] Yep, it gets pretty busy around this time normally.
35:37 [D] Does it really?
35:41 [A] Through this door here is the secondary heat exchanger.
35:44 It might seem like an awfully big
35:46 system for a 45 kilowatts worth of electricity,
35:48 but that's because it's a safe design, not a spatially efficient design.
35:53 It's a pipe within a pipe heat exchanger.
35:55 The innermost pipe carries the liquid metal coolant from the middleman loop.
35:59 Around that is a filled with argon gas,
36:01 the totally noble nonreactive gas we've talked about before.
36:04 Then around that is the pipe carrying water to be heated,
36:06 boiled, and sent up to the turbine.
36:08 [D] So the heat has to go through the argon?
36:09 [A] Yeah.
36:10 That's why it's so big, because argon is not particularly conductive.
36:13 But the argon is there for a good reason.
36:15 If you do have a pipe breach on either side,
36:17 you don't want the coolants to come into to mix that will cause an explosion.
36:22 So instead, they'll only be able to mix with argon,
36:24 which is completely nonreactive.
36:26 That's why you have the jacket between those two layers.
36:28 So I always stop here just for a moment.
36:30 There's not too much to see in here,
36:32 but this is the primary coolant loop feeding coolant right from the reactor.
36:36 I do like to note the thickness of this wall.
36:38 A lot of people have the misconception that these early nuclear
36:41 scientists would have received high doses of radiation working at these plants.
36:45 That was true for some experiments that they operated,
36:48 but not for the plant itself.
36:49 This wall is 4 feet thick to act as gamma radiation shielding.
36:53 They knew, based on studies they've been doing in Japan,
36:55 that they had to shield from that radiation,
36:57 and you need a minimum of 4 feet of water or high
36:59 density concrete or three feet of lead to mitigate those effects.
37:02 That's why this wall is so thick.
37:04 [D] That's concrete.
37:05 Oh, yeah, those are not concrete.
37:07 Excuse me, those are not cinder block bricks, they're concrete bricks.
37:09 [A] Yep.
37:10 [D] Okay.
37:11 [A] This right to my left is the cask that would
37:14 allow us to pull spent fuel rods out of the reactor.
37:16 It's a lead-lined container that helps trap the radiation within.
37:19 The tank on the back of it fills it
37:21 with argon so that when they pull the fuel rods,
37:23 there's no oxygen interacting with the liquid metal coolant.
37:27 They'd have to pull it one rod at a time, so it was a pretty lengthy process.
37:31 [D] So they would put something down in there, grab a rod and pull it out?
37:34 [A] Yeah.
37:34 Basically, they'd take this 10-ton crane above us in the corner.
37:38 They'd hoist this cask up on top of the reactor, and it would sit on this plug,
37:42 but this would be upstairs where the hole in the reactor we saw is.
37:45 It's just right up there.
37:46 They'd be able to rotate this plug, and then through these three hatches,
37:49 they could gain access to the different parts of the reactor
37:51 and pull just a single rod out at a time.
37:55 [D] That's cool.
37:56 [A] Once they have the single rod out, they'd close up the top of the reactor,
37:58 close up the bottom of the cask and move
38:00 the rest or move the whole cask for cleaning and storage.
38:03 [D] And so they could just store the rods?
38:04 [A] They had to store the rods.
38:06 The daughter products within them,
38:07 when you take this big atom of uranium and break it in half,
38:10 those two daughter products are unstable.
38:12 When they break down, they don't just release radiation, they also release heat,
38:15 so the rods keep themselves hot for a long time.
38:18 You have to store them before you can ever do work on them.
38:21 That way, they have time to cool.
38:22 [D] Oh, wow.
38:23 So there's a lot of thermal capacity there.
38:24 [A] Oh, yeah.
38:25 [D] Fuel rods.
38:28 Is this where they would store them?
38:29 [A] This is where they store the fuel rods before they went into the reactor.
38:32 The vault here might make it seem like you needed a bunch of shielding.
38:35 Really, the vault's just to prevent anybody from gaining
38:38 access if they're not supposed to, and for accountability.
38:41 At the time, we were shipping all of our uranium from Africa.
38:44 The military wasn't certain that we'd be able to continue those shipments,
38:48 so they kept a very tight track of essentially every ounce of uranium.
38:53 We'd bring it here from Hanford, we'd weigh it before it went into the vault.
38:56 If we ever needed, let's say, three pounds of replacement fuel,
38:59 we'd We have to weigh it very carefully before we took it out of the vault.
39:02 So this helps us keep track of all the uranium that we're using.
39:06 [D] But they could just store the actual rods out in the open like that?
39:09 [A] Yeah, you don't need any special shielding for natural uranium.
39:12 This is concentrated 235,
39:13 so it's not natural in the sense that it's pulled right out of the ground.
39:17 But this hasn't started fissioning, which means almost all the radiation it
39:21 produces is in the form of alpha particles, which will be stopped by your skin.
39:25 You'd have to breathe this uranium in or swallow it for it to cause you cancer.
39:29 And at that point, you've got other issues because it's a heavy, toxic metal.
39:32 It's pretty benign in this form.
39:34 The reason you have to be so much more careful once we
39:36 pull it out of the reactor is because of those daughter products.
39:39 When you take that big atom and split it in half,
39:41 its instability will cause it to release radiation as it breaks down.
39:44 That's the more dangerous form of radiation we have to be careful about.
39:48 [D] Andrew, have you memorized this or are
39:50 you just shooting from the hip right now?
39:52 [A] A bit of both.
39:53 [D] Really?
39:54 [A] It's not my exact tour schedule.
39:56 [D] But you actually know this stuff.
39:59 [A] Yeah.
40:00 [D] And you love it?
40:00 [A] Oh, of course.
40:01 [D] Okay, great.
40:02 That's awesome.
40:03 All right.
40:04 [A] I mean, this facility really is
40:06 the perfect mixture of engineering and history for me.
40:08 My two biggest passions, so I love this place.
40:10 [D] It's awesome, dude.
40:12 Andrew really is a remarkable tour guide,
40:14 and he showed me a ton of more fascinating stuff.
40:17 And I'm going to put that over on Smarter Every Day 2,
40:20 because I don't want this video to be an hour long.
40:22 For example, he explained to me that EBR-1 had a partial meltdown one time,
40:26 but they knew this could happen, and they were testing the safety systems so
40:30 that they could roll that forward into future reactor design.
40:33 They used this event to learn about how
40:35 to clean up after something like this occurs,
40:37 which they clearly did because I'm standing in the facility.
40:40 He took me downstairs and he showed me where they worked
40:42 on the rods and the blanket to inspect them and repair them.
40:45 They had to build impressive machinery to move
40:47 these things around while they're radioactive, reactor parts.
40:50 It's fascinating stuff.
40:52 He also took me outside and showed me these two reactors.
40:55 These were intended to be part of a jet airplane.
40:57 The government ended up abandoning that program,
41:00 which is probably the right idea, but it's pretty awesome.
41:03 And I'm going to put that all over on Smarter Every Day 2.
41:05 So please check out that video.
41:07 I'm really grateful to Andrew for sharing his passion with me.
41:11 This was a lot of fun.
41:12 I hope you are half as excited as I am about the Nuclear
41:15 Power Deep Dive series because I wanted to understand nuclear power forever,
41:19 and we're finally getting to do it.
41:21 So this is what I'm going to ask.
41:23 Typically, I would say there's a lot of videos here.
41:25 Please consider subscribing to Smarter Every Day,
41:27 but I don't think that works like it used to on YouTube.
41:30 So what I'm going to ask is,
41:32 would you consider signing up for Smarter Every Day email updates?
41:36 You can do that at the link down in the video description,
41:39 smartereveryday.com/emaillist or something like that.
41:42 If you would consider that, I would greatly appreciate it.
41:44 I will notify you when a new video
41:46 from the Nuclear Power Deep Dive series comes out.
41:49 These videos are incredible.
41:51 We filmed them at Idaho National Labs, but there's all kinds of stuff.
41:54 We're looking at this special glass-blowing thing.
41:56 How do you measure the temperature of a reactor?
41:59 What happens when you have waste that you have to handle?
42:02 How do you do that?
42:03 These are really, really neat videos,
42:04 and I think you're going to love them, so go check that out.
42:07 So, yeah, that's it.
42:08 Please consider subscribing to Smarter Every Day via the email list.
42:12 And a big thank you to everybody that supports Smarter Every Day on Patreon.
42:17 I'm trying to make intelligent,
42:18 respectful content that I think should exist on the internet,
42:22 so please consider that as well down in the link.
42:24 Last thing, I've got a link below to a form.
42:28 If you have access to a currently working nuclear power plant,
42:32 I'm trying to get into one, and that's proving to be difficult.
42:36 Also, if you have other things
42:38 in the nuclear industry you think I should consider,
42:40 then there's a form down in the video description.
42:42 If you click that and fill that out, I would really appreciate that.
42:46 Anyway, that's it.
42:47 I'm Destin.
42:47 You're getting Smarter Every Day.
42:49 Nuclear power.
42:50 Let's do it.
42:51 Have a good one.
42:52 Bye.