Cody'sLab - 2017-12-29
I extract some Uranium metal from a rock. Radioactive box: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbOt8Au6thY Help me make videos by donating here: https://www.patreon.com/CodysLab Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/codydonreeder SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/codyslab/
Cody: 21:30 "Well in reality it took about 12 hours" making it sound like a long time
Also Cody: "So I've had this in the freezer for 3 years which should be enough"
😆🤣😂😹
So my great greant granddad stored this sample in this mine where its been for the last 200 years...
3:49 Also Cody: “ ok this has been rolling for a couple of days now..”
For anyone who is worried about Cody's process producing something Truly Scary ... First note the size of the original rock, and then notice that he produced a tiny pebble at the end. That tiny pebble (if it were completely pure) is .711% "Truly Scary Stuff" (TSS for short). To be useful for power generation, he'd need to make hundreds of pounds of those pebbles, after purifying it to 35% TSS. To make something Truly Scary, that would need to be around 90-95% TSS.
Considering that between 1941 and 1945, it took the US Government, trying very very hard, about 4 years to get enough TSS for two Truly Scary things (with one other Truly Scary thing made by a different method using a different element by a different process), and considering that they used millions of times the person-hours Cody used, and equipment which, even for 1945, was very significantly more sophisticated ... The likelihood that Cody, or anyone similarly equipped, could go from ore to a Truly Scary Thing is laughably small.
That said, lemon cakes are not safe to bake.
TBH, you dont need to «purify» (enrich) so high for power generation... 35% enrichment is HALEU, breeder reactor starting fuel, not the usual LEU used in light water reactors which may go to some 5% enrichment... And heavy water or graphite moderated reactors (CANDU,RBMK,IPHWR) can use NU as fuel directly.. the Truly Scary TSS is also used for power generation in submarines and carriers, not only for bombs.
@JDaniel M Even 5% would take a lot more processing than Cody could do on his own. If it was easy, everyone would have Truly Scary Things in their basements.
@WhereWhatHuh Of course. Gas diffusers or ultracentrifuges.... For the centrifuges you would need to pass it along some 10 times. Many more for the gas diffusion.
And tbh I'd love to have a miniature nuclear reactor in the basement - heat my home in the winter and electricity too!
@JDaniel M Maybe when 5th gen pebble-bed are ready for prime-time...
Our rejection of Nuclear power was a massive mistake, and the environment has payed dearly for it as we continue to rely on fossil fuels for our electricity
@Juicy342YT it’s not the safety reason why they aren’t building plants it’s the price. It’s just not economically viable to build run and maintain. Money always wins.
@Dev Swell In the long term (25+ years) it's the most economical option out there.
@David Botos if the industry was heavily backed we would've made leaps in improvements. Even in it's current abysmal funding it's still way more eco friendly and efficient than fossil fuels
Payd.
@kluaf oz nope, just a concerned citizen
"You need alot of knowledge to do this safely even i could have done this alot more safely" proceeds to wear shirt that says forget lab safety i want super powers
@Gra Gor both
@AVCI What is the price of something? Do we only look at the price for the commodity (what you asked) or do we look at the cradle to grave cost? (My point) . Uranium has has a very large cost to date and to date none of it has been successfully stored in perpetuity. The waste never goes away.
That's pretty much my point.
Thankfully he isnt messing with radiant energy… or is he a Tesla too lol
The point is that he can kill himself, but not others nearby, who are unaware of their clumsy chemist neighbor .
Can’t blame a guy for trying.
What got me the most about the reaction to this video was that you had your centrifuge taken away. The government agents just heard "He's using uranium with a centrifuge!"
And despite a regular laboratory centrifuge being incapable of being able to enrich uranium, they confiscated it anyway.
govt attract competence
That’s the point he is enriching it, well getting there and Uranium don’t need to be very enriched for a big boom.
@Neil Mielich Wait, what? "Highly Enriched Uranium" is uranium that contains 20% or more U-235 suitable for use in nuclear reactors (the exact level of enrichment differs based on the type of reactor), and weapons grade uranium is uranium that's been enriched to over 90% U-235.
What Cody did here was extract the uranium, with the natural levels of each isotope. He didn't do anything to increase the levels of U-235 beyond the natural level.
@Crowbars2 You did say yourself that a regular centrifuge could not possibly enrich uranium. Why are you contradicting yourself?
@Riovo Gaming Where did I say that?
He didn't do anything to increase the levels of U-235 beyond the natural level.
Uranium extraction means to remove the uranium metal from an ore sample. Uranium enrichment means to increase the proportion of the fissile Uranium-235 isotope.
What Cody did in this video was to take the uranium metal out of the ore sample, giving him refined uranium metal, contaning the natural levels of each isotope. He did not enrich it, i.e., he did nothing to increase the levels of U-235 beyond the natural levels.
You need a gas centrifuge to enrich uranium, and to convert the uranium to uranium hexafluoride.
My grandfather used to be a foreman at Mollycorp in NV. They mined and processed minerals and elements. When he retired they gave him a big display case with glass tubes containing all the things they recovered. One of them was YELLOW CAKE. I always was curious about that material.
I love how cody doesn't say, "don't try this at home," he says "try this at home, but make sure you know what you're doing first"
For me as a chemist, the scariest part about this video was: "let's add some hydrofluoric acid."
I'm fine with uranium, radioactive materials, nitric acid, etc. But I won't get near that stuff!
I had to work with hf at my old job making wafers as part of the lithography team...stuff is no joke. They had 1 incident and the guy barely made it so they upped the training, made the safety videos longer and scarier, and further limited who had access to it. Needless to say anyone who had to access it for a refill were visibly nervous. We worked with a lot of hard-core chemicals but none could illicit such a response as hf.
@carsaboy . An interesting property of HF is that in its gaseous form, it can actually become a superacid on its own. It can be both a weak and a strong acid.
@johnson 17 I've never had the pleasure to work with it, but even 25 years ago when I was full time in the lab it was the chem that everyone had a super healthy NOOOOOOOPE regarding it. Working with Sulphur and other beta emitters daily was MEH by comparison.
work with it everyday, not super comfortable with it
I was going to fall asleep, and hydrofluoric acid suddenly woke me up.
I just wanna state I do NOT intend on repeating this process. FBI surveillance would be better used on someone else.
Same here
I 100% am reproducing this. And I don’t care if i am on a list. Know I am already. Stop me lol!
Nothing shown in this video will be useful if you had wanted to make bombs. This is pure, beautiful chemistry. Nothing else. No need to get sketched out though you are obviously joking...
Nonsense
I agree
I'm preparing a Nuclear engineering materials exam and I'm studying the steps while watching this video.
Great job man 👏🏻👏🏻
I love the ore to metal videos of the mini g series. Especially the rock crusher is a gem.
Perhaps we get back into mining once chicken hole base is more finished.
Hey everyone, I think Cody knows a little about chemistry. Maybe even more than the average person.
Never got into chemistry but this video helped me to understand that there are many different chemical steps involved in the process to extract minerals and metals.Way above my pay grade guess its the same in petroleum crackers in refineries where they separate out the different fuels at different levels and even recovery the gas generated in the process.Probably on a watch list for watching it the way things are going these days,so be it.
I once carried a lump of Depleted Uranium about the size of a brick (aircraft flight control counter weight) and it really makes me appreciate the work involved in making it.
I am so impressed with this man's knowledge.
uranium ore is so common where i live, you can just pick up ore laying around on the ground lol. there are multiple open pit mines in my area. from what i understand, the USGS or the DOE don't really care much about picking up a few chunks of ore here and there, or even extracting the metal from the ore. its when you get the big boy centrifuge that the DOE gets VERY interested in exactly what you are doing. Or if you start gathering large amounts of ore, the DOE will show up at your house and ask what is going on. The Nuclear Boyscout is a really interesting story about someone who just didn't give a shit about the DOE and gathered a shocking amount of radioactive material legally.
@Kirivon there are many uses if radioactive material for individuals
@Young Lee Political views are on a spectrum. People like you always want to hold libertarians to the most hard-line views and let everyone else sit somewhere on the spectrum.
@Robin Lucassen some got Gov't money, they were paying 100,000. My 2nd wife was raised in Monticello UT. When we got married i lived in Marysvale UT which is a hot spot for uranium. She lasted 10 years just died from cancer, she was 56. My 1st wife died from it at 46 she spent her life in marysvale UT. Miners i used to haul for are all dead from it. I hauled some 2 percent so a 50,000 lbs truck load would have 1000 lbs of pure. Thats hot. Im 60 and take care of my self but it will get me too probably at 75.
@Young Lee Well that was plainly absurd to read. Private entities with nukes--what could go wrong?
@Young Lee definitely do not process or enrich uranium at home. there are many reasons agencies don't want civilians owning fissile material. nuclear criticality safety is something the average person does not understand, and an accident involving criticality is likely to involve many orders of magnitude higher people than anything involving a gun or an explosive.
also worth mentioning the processes for enriching uranium involve unbelievably dangerous and unsafe chemicals that no one should ever have to be exposed to...
This video is what made me so interested in studying actinide chemistry I'm so glad it's back.
this is your greatest work yet cody, I'm glad to be able to finally (officially) watch it again
Fascinating and dangerous for sure. Cody is amazing! Great health to all.
great step by step walkthrough on producing yellow cake your descriptions of each step in the procedure was very helpful bcuz you made the learning process simple and helped to allow a newby like me to stay focused
Man, I still enjoy this video. It's one of the most pure gemstones ever put on YouTube
My greatest respect for you cody. There are some things, which i am never ever will work with, and one of these are radioactive materials. For me this was like a horrorshow, when i saw all this fumes , powders and gases. Every second i imagined, that a littlebit small thing of this, if you inhalate it, you will have forfeited your life.
Watching the evolution of this channel over the yrs has been amazing i never caught this one when it was fresh glad to see a classic cody
I recently found a peice of uranium ore in a vintage mineral identifying box. As a non scientist i wish i could do something cool with it, and watching this video is a good reason for me not to mess with it and keep it in its box. XD
Hi, just a safety suggestion.
While crushing toxic or radioactive solids you can enventualy use a big plastic bag and enclose the whole mortar inside.
Watching this video after a bunch of nile red, and seeing how so much of the equipment is kitchenware, including a microwave disk, I am anxious.
@Danko Kapitan the ore he had wasn’t bad, the collection of old radium watch dials was pretty dangerous though
he is cody he has super powers he dont need safety
...and it makes me like watching it a lot more...
nileredneck
@Mystery Man if youre not sure if uranium is even a heavy metal, then you shouldnt be giving your take on chemistry safety. Because clearly you are out of your depth, and i dont think people with zero experience in radioactive safety should be giving their takes on what they think is safe and not safe...
This is cool looking at the steps involved and the chemistry, though U3O8 could be reduced with Li directly I would think- Maybe in solvent or inert atmosphere?
Am I the only one that knows nothing about chemistry but is happy to join the ride? I've only subscribed to this channel a few months ago but I keep binge watching videos whenever I see them in my feed, and while I don't understand the entire chemical compounds he makes, I appreciate the whole process.
I might not fully understand the chemistry behind the process nor am I versed in metallurgy, it is fascinating to watch again and again, learning a little each time.
Cody, your a legend in my books, love you bro, your amazing, thank your for the awesome content !
Great start! Now build your calutron and gas diffusion labs and compare the relative effectiveness of each enrichment method (you will probably need about $4B 1944US and a local surplus of hydroelectric power). For extra credit build a small pile for a fast breeder to create plutonium238 from whatever Neptunium you might have laying around the lab. Could make a handy backup RTG Mars/Chickenhole Base power supply. Better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it!
As an explosions&fire fan I get pretty apprehensive everytime something turns yellow
Thank you for this, i can finally make mini RBMK. It uses low enriched uranium, few processes after this and it shouldn't be a problem ;)
@andrei ka there are far cheaper ways than centrifuge and without nasty hf . i like this idea of a small accelerator with electrostatic deflection like a CRT. if its long enough 235 and 238 etc will land in different zones making a rainbow of isotopes
@MegaMiana - Space Force Commander I know thorium is cool but that's terrifyingly specific
@Alex S RBMK uses U238
Try a CanDU design, you can practically piss in the fuel and it’ll still fission fine
did you succeed ?
Love watching chemical reactions, go from mountain dew to cake batter with 1 reaction 😆
Whoa, they actually allowed this video to be public again?! 😲
Uranium, radium,hydroflouric acid, sulphur dioxide gas.. this is some badass stuff
@Eva except the stolen revenue
@AVCI 100k
@Bengineer8 bro, he's trying to make some money from the ads on these videos. Reuploaders are stealing the views that would otherwise generate some cash for him. So nah, screw the reuploaders lmao.
@J K Clarification: I am only okay with reuploaders when the original isn't available. Didn't think I had to clarify that.
I love the bluish radium power stuff. I'm sure he saved that in a tiny jar somewhere. I know I would have.
Glad to see this back online.. Cody we want more of this type of stuff extract refine ect..
I wish that I could apprentice under this guy. I have watched Cody since I was a kid. Thank You for getting me interested in science.
man, you go through all this hard and tedious work for content, thanks a lot. I enjoyed it so much!
The most impressive part is how you re-treat the waste to make it environmentally and humanly harmless.
extremely standard chemical waste processes, as far as i know.
You simply risk your health to bring us very valuable contents. I take my hat off to you.
I'm really really glad this is back on Youtube. I was missing it when it was gone. Such pretty colors!!
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. Sorry you had a negative experience with our government afterwards. I am going to guess that all of the F block elements are this hard to reduce to metal.
I’ve read about radioactive ores like uranium, but never actually seen it. Interesting! Thanks for the video.
I don't know much about chemistry, but found the whole process fascinating to watch.
Huh. Didn’t realize there was so much work that went into it. I thought you just melted it. My grandpa actually has a small vial of yellowcake. My grandma is scared of it, but most of the small amount of radiation is blocked by the glass it is in.
anyone else notice that when he set his counter aside after checking the yellowcake that it continued to pick up radioactivity from the floor? I'll bet it's that way all around his house.
When I was a teenager in the late 1960's I ordered some Uranium Nitrate by mail order. Of course there was no such thing as 'online' those days, you had to find chemical suppliers in a mail order magazine and send your money by post. But I did get some UN03. I can't remember where it ended up though. I was very disappointed that it didn't glow in the dark.
I know it's "just another element", but somehow it doesn't seem right whenever I see uranium compounded with other substances. It's bizarre to remember that uranium, despite its use in bombs and reactors, is a metal/element like any other, forming bonds and doing normal chemical stuff
Metabloxer - 2022-05-05
"This uranium can't be used for making bombs without enriching it, so don't worry."
*Later cuts to Cody shuffling around in a dark room starting a large piece of motorized machinery with no context
William Grimes - 2022-09-06
@Nobody Important uranium needs to go through an enrichment process to be weaponized. And the US keeps taking their tools away and or sabotaging them
A retail Cashier - 2022-09-07
nah, the amount of usable uranium for making a uranium based nuke would be far too small to do anything useful with. at that quantity your better off separating the lighter isotopes of uranium and sticking the remaining sample in a breeder reactor to make plutonium
S V - 2022-09-16
@Nobody Important The further down the enrichment process you go the more difficult it becomes. But also isolating the 238 uranium is difficult. Then Scaling up the process further complicates it.
Not a chemist.
Uncreative NAME - 2022-10-11
@Nobody Important Cody isolated natural uranium, natural uranium is 99.8% U238 (the rest is U235) and U238 cannot sustain fission, so that means no bombs or reactors, you need to separate U235 but that's really hard because on an atomic scale, U235 and U238 are extremely similar, U238 just has 3 more neutrons than U235 and that makes It BARELY heavier than U235 so It's very hard to separate them, there are no chemical methods, you literally have just the option of separating them based on the fact that U238 is very slightly heavier (cyclotrons each separate 50micrograms of U235 per hour, that means 2 years of continuous operation for 1 gram of U235 which can't do anything)
Cool Dr Money - 2022-10-22
comments like these were why YT assumed its police presence, but u got ur like tho. fu u