1h08m28s16f Thorium Impactical for Making a Bomb During WW2 - Thorium Set Aside TR2016a
Channel: Thorium Remix
Date: 26/04/2017

http://ThoriumRemix.com/ Then they said- Well, what can we do with all this junk Uranium-238, the 99.3% of it?

You could expose it to neutrons, and you could make it into Plutonium.

Now, plutonium is a different chemical element than uranium, so they can be chemically separated.

Because uranium-235 and uranium-238 are identical chemically.

There's no chemical difference between them. 

But there is a chemical difference between plutonium and uranium, so it was a lot easier to do a chemical separation of the plutonium you'd made.

And that's also how they made the Nagasaki bomb which was called "Fat Man".

OK, well, maybe we can do the same thing with thorium. Maybe
we can expose it to neutrons, and we can make it into Uranium-233.

Uranium will be chemically separable from thorium, and we can go make a bomb out of it. Right? Sounds great.

It's a really bad idea, because as you made the Uranium-233, you were always
making Uranium-232. 

You didn't make a lot of it you only made a little bit of it. But, Uranium-232 is much more radioactive than Uranium-233.

Here's the decay chain that Uranium-232 is on. 

It jumps down to Bismuth-212 and Thallium-208 and these 2 decay products put out very, very strong gamma rays.

And these gamma rays are just super bad news if you want to go and build a practical nuclear device.

Because they tell everybody where the stuff is and they kill you.

So really quickly they were going, okay, we can work with Uranium-235, that seems okay.

We can work with plutonium, that seems okay, but this Uranium-233 stuff that's bad news for making a nuclear weapon.

So thorium was just set aside.