➡ The text discusses the potential dangers of enriched uranium and nuclear power plants. It explains that while enriched uranium can be used to create a bomb, it has no commercial use. If a nuclear power plant is damaged, it could release harmful radioactive material into the environment, similar to the Chernobyl disaster. However, nuclear facilities are designed with safety measures to contain such incidents, and the risk of a catastrophic event is low unless the material becomes critical.

➡ This text discusses the importance of understanding and protecting oneself from potential nuclear fallout. It mentions a device, created by Kai, that accurately detects radiation, unlike many others on the market. The text also promotes CanadianPreparedness.com, a site offering quality survival gear, and encourages viewers to stay safe and prepared.

The Trump administration held a second round of talks with Iranian officials over the weekend on the country’s nuclear program. And over the years, we’ve seen that Iran has enriched its uranium to 60%. Weapons grade is, what, 90% plus. At that point, you just slam the stuff together and it goes boom. If you control that reaction, then you’ve got a nuclear power plant. If it’s uncontrolled, you’ve got a bomb. The light-water reactors run at 3 to 5%. Some smaller reactors, like on subs, they need to put 20%. But I don’t know anything that needs 60%. And although Iran continues to say that it’s not trying to have a nuclear weapon, it is clearly hoping to have the option to get there quite quickly if it feels under an existential threat.

You know, the Manhattan Project produced Little Boy and Fat Man. Little Boy was a uranium device, so two pieces of uranium got shot together. Fat Man was plutonium, so two totally different processes that they came up with with bombs. As far as I know, the concern in Iran is that they’re going through the uranium path. You make a nuclear bomb out of it, or you make a nuclear reactor out of it. Hi, folks. Canadian Prepper here. Today on the channel, we have Kai, the radiation guy, and Andre, who was a control tech at a nuclear facility, one of Canada’s biggest nuclear facilities, the Bruce facility.

And what we’re going to talk about today is not what would happen after a nuclear explosion, per se, but a lesser known hazard in the post-apocalyptic wasteland is going to be what happens to the nuclear power plants and all of the other stages of the enrichment process. So top of mind right now for a lot of people is Iran, because there’s a lot of talk about striking Iranian nuclear facilities. And I’ve been saying something in my videos pretty much every day that you’ve taken issue with, and you keep texting me, and you’re like, Nate, stop saying that.

And so we decided, you know, you’re going to come in here and explain exactly what the risks are of targeting different aspects of the supply chain, I suppose, from the mines all the way up to the nuclear plant itself. And that’s why we have Andre here, who’s worked in a facility, hopefully is going to be able to shed some light on this stuff. So when they had the JCPOA, it was a 3.67% enrichment level that was agreed to, and they didn’t want them to go beyond that. Now they’re enriching it to 60%.

The thing that you took issue with that I’ve been saying on the channel is, okay, if they were to target these enrichment facilities with conventional weapons, non-nuclear weapons, I was saying that it would still be a radiological incident, because there’s all these centrifuges with enriched uranium. But you’re saying you’re fine, you go down there, and you sprinkle it on your cornflakes, and everything would be fine. There’s a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t sprinkle on my cornflakes. Uranium is one of them, but it’s not a humongous radiological concern. It’s heavy metal. It’s heavy metal.

But what about the enriched version? The U-235 has a somewhat shorter half-life than the U-238. It’s 700 million years instead of four and a half billion years. So it’s about six times more radioactive. But again, compared to things like radium and Season 137 and cobalt, it is still billions of times less radioactive, pound-for-pound. So it’s, yeah, you don’t want to sprinkle it on your cornflakes. But they use it in nuclear reactors, right? They use it because it’s fissionable. Okay, so you set off a reaction, and then it becomes… It’s a chain reaction. And then it splits apart, and it becomes your cesiums and the stuff that is highly radioactive.

So in its natural form, like in a uranium mine, if you were to blow up a uranium mine, you could go there and have a party the next day and be fine. Pretty much. It’s not good. Like any industrial facility, uranium is toxic as well as radioactive. It’s heavy metal. Yeah, the toxicity is usually more of an issue than the radioactivity of it. This is the decay chain of uranium. So whenever you have uranium, it’ll eventually decay into all of these things, and they would all be present in the uranium mine. So when you’re mining the stuff, you’re pulling all of this stuff up the surface.

So uranium turns into all these things? It turns into all of these things, and because it’s been underground for millions of billions of years, it has had time to become all these things. Okay. The shorter the half-life, 1,600 years, the more radioactive it is. So this has a half-life of four and a half billion years. This has a half-life of 1,600 years. So when you’re mining this, you’re pulling all of this stuff onto the surface. The mill separates the uranium out, leaves everything else in the tailings. So it’s kind of like when you get oil and then you break it down into all its various hydrocarbon gas.

Except nowadays, you only care about uranium. The other stuff stays at the mine site. So then if they were to, going back to the Iranian situation, if Israel or the United States were to attack an Iranian mine, the effects would be so dispersed and so diffused that it wouldn’t be that significant? Yeah, a mine is a mine. Because it’s just mostly this. It’s this and a few hundred thousand tons of rock spread out, right? So it’s very diffused. It’s not even this concentrated, right? So there is no threat. What you’re saying, if they were to blow up like the Fordow facility or the Natanz facility, especially seeing as it’s going to be entombed in 100 meters of rock, there is very little risk of a large-scale contamination, radiological contamination.

Not from the uranium itself. Now, when you have highly enriched material, you kind of have to be careful that it does not become critical. How does it go from getting critical? Because you said you have to initiate a reaction. How do they do that? It depends what’s around it. So weapons grade is what, 90% plus? So at that point, you just slam the stuff together and it goes boom. So that’s like the importance of that launching mechanism inside the bomb is you need something that’s going to start that reaction. It’s got to be fast enough so it doesn’t blow itself apart before you breathe like a supercritical state.

So here’s your uranium-235. A neutron comes and hits it. It gets absorbed into that. It doesn’t like being that big and it splits apart into two lighter fragments and makes more neutrons. Is that a nuclear explosion or is that just a control? It’s a miniature neutron. Okay, I see what you mean. So this is what they use for nuclear power? That is fission. That’s fission. You make a nuclear bomb out of it or you make a nuclear reactor out of it. It just depends on how fast you let it go. If you control that reaction, then you got a nuclear power plant.

If it’s uncontrolled, you got a bomb. You know, the Manhattan Project produced, what is it, Little Boy and Fat Man? Little Boy was a uranium device. So two pieces of uranium got shot together. Fat Man was a plutonium device. So two totally different processes that they came up with with bombs. So as far as I know, the concern in Iran is that they’re going through uranium path and haven’t heard much about the plutonium path. So what if we go up the supply chain then? How does this factor into uranium enrichment? The ore in the ground will be 99.3% U-238 and 0.7% U-235.

So the 235 is not part of that decay chain. What is the difference between those two things? The 235 is fissionable. That’s the stuff you make a bomb out of. That’s the stuff you burn in a reactor. So you get the yellow cake and 0.7% of that is the fizzable stuff. Yeah, exactly. So the yellow cake that’s shipped around, it still has only the 0.7%. And then to enrich it, you run it through centrifuges. So what is a centrifuge? How do you take that 238 and make it strictly into 230? Like what is it doing? A centrifuge, centrifuge spins around fast.

238 has a mass of 238 atomic mass units. 235 has 235 atomic mass units. So the 235 is lighter than the 238. So when you’re spinning that, you have six that has the 238 on it. It’ll want to go to the outside and the 235 will go on the inside. And so they separate it that way. Is there any reason for them to enrich uranium to 60% just for civilian nuclear purposes? Like what could possibly be the reason for that? Not that I know of. Like we said, the light water reactors run at 3% to 5%.

Some smaller reactors, like on subs, they need about 20% because they’re physically smaller. But I don’t know anything that needs 60%. So there’s only one reason. And they’re open about that. It’s not like it’s a secret. They’re saying that they’re doing it. Maybe they’re saying they’re doing it for research purposes or medical purposes. Is there any medical use for enriched uranium to that extent? It’s not that radioactive. And chemically it’s the same thing as normal uranium. I mean, one can only assume then that it is to be used as leverage to say that, hey, you know, we could create a bomb.

We have all the components. And so the time that it takes to get from 60% to 90% is in a long time. Is it just a matter of spinning those centrifuges for a few more days or how does that… I don’t know how many days, but essentially that’s what it boils down to. It’s just doing the same thing over and over again that got you from 0.7% to 60%. So you’re saying that just to be clear, there is really little to no reason to have that enriched uranium, because that’s a fairly cut and dry then.

Yep, there’s no commercial purpose for it. Well, what’s going to happen to all the nuclear power plants? They’re actually directly hit with a conventional weapon. The Bouchard nuclear plant, what if there was an incident at this facility? If you damage the reactor, there’s going to be all kinds of fissionable material coming out of that reactor that’s going to be contaminating the environment around it, right? Is that going to be largely benign or is it going to risk of spread like into the atmosphere? Yeah, if you look at Chernobyl, that’s basically what happened.

The reactor, the top blew off it and the contamination was spread. It’s probably a 20-mile exclusion zone around there where it’s not safe for humans because the background radiation is so high. Yeah, I think that Chernobyl, they detected it in Sweden. The radiation detectors were going off in Sweden before the Russians fessed up that they had a problem. It set up the radiation alarms at their nuclear plants, people going in and out and they thought that people were contaminated. But in reality, it was stuff coming in from over the wind. What happens if you just leave a nuclear plant unattended? Does it blow up or does it just kind of ooze radiation for centuries? The material that’s in there is radioactive.

It’s going to be radioactive for a long period of time. But the immediate danger is going to go away. It’s not going to go critical and blow up. That reactor cannot. But if somebody could get ahold of that material, it’d be very risky to them personally. You need a lead suit basically to go anywhere near that stuff. Let’s say somebody wanted to make a dirty bomb. So you’re saying that if they wanted to do that, they would really be exposing themselves. Oh, definitely. They’d be risking their lives just to make that dirty bomb. But we can rest assured that it’s mostly localized unless there is something that really disperses it into the atmosphere or something like that.

I think the plants are designed to contain it even if they lose the moderator water. Yeah, like in our nuclear facilities here, they have what’s called a vacuum building. There’s 365 stairs to the top of the thing and it’s built at a one-meter thick concrete. And all there is is these J-tubes are called, filled with water. Let’s say there’s a leak in the reactor and steam comes out and the pressure rises. Water gets sucked up those tubes and then that vacuum building sucks everything out of the containment into that vacuum building.

Our nuclear facilities in Canada try to contain anything that could happen. Yeah, there’s a lot of safety precautions. Okay, well, that’s good to know. But at the same time, I know Netanyahu’s watching this episode and he’s thinking to himself, hmm, you mean I can get away with this and there won’t be a radiological incident? Likely not. But like I said, you’ve got to be careful that your enriched material doesn’t become critical. So if things get shuffled around, if water floods and whatever, it can become critical. That means you’ve got fission products around, you can get pressure build up, and you can make a mess as well.

Now I have no idea how likely that would be, but it’s a non-zero chance that things become critical. Israel has a Dimona reactor. Let’s see if we can find it here. So if Iran was to, that’s another thing they could do is they could strike one of these facilities in Israel. Let’s say Iran could use a conventional weapon to blow up a nuclear power plant, and then that could have disastrous effects for Israel, couldn’t it? Or would it be largely contained again to that? Well, I mean, the blast would spread stuff around.

It would be like a Chernobyl. Yeah, and then the stuff would still be, you know, the reaction heat would still be in there. Yeah, I think after Chernobyl, they were distributing iodine pills to people within a certain area just to prevent an uptake of their radioactive iodine. If you took the fuel after it’s been in the reactor and you ground that up into a powder and spread it out, you know, across the countryside or dispersed it through a conventional bomb, you’re going to make that land not much useful.

You know, it’s not going to be much use after that to grow things, and so you could do a lot of damage with some of that spent fuel. Even if Iran doesn’t have a nuke, they have to be careful, because the nuke is right there. You have a dirty bomb. So, yeah, as we said, I mean, we probably don’t have to dwell on this any much longer, but there’s enrichment facilities, military complexes. There’s probably a lot of steps along this supply chain that they might try to target to interdict the development of nuclear weapons, if that’s even a thing.

So, this is back in 96. I was probably in a high school parking lot somewhere, smoking a doobie or something, and you were out there cleaning up yellow cake, but you don’t look like you’re too worried. No, because there’s hardly any radiation coming off of it. What’s happening in this scene here? What’s happening is the yellow cake truck touched the mail truck, ended up jackknifing. The load went flying forward, and the one drum popped the slit open and spilled some yellow cake out, and essentially I just wiped it up with a paper towel.

We put the busted drum into a bigger drum called an overpack and loaded it on a different truck and sent it on. So, is this right out of a mine? This is right out of the mine, yeah. All right, so let’s do a little hands-on demo. We’ve got some rave beads. I brought in a whole bunch of uranium to see if we’re still alive at the end of this show. That means it’s not that dangerous. And you wear these on the town when you go out at night? Exactly, exactly. They’re sold just as glow-in-the-dark beads.

Main hazard is don’t let your toddlers play with it because they are small and they could choke on them, right? But there’s no radiation issues with them. They’re about 2% uranium. So just theoretically, if I had enough of these, I could make a new coat of these. You’d need a pretty big pile. Well, what you’re saying is there’s a chance. And you’d have to probably put them in some kind of a moderator. To make a nuke, you would have to enrich it. Yeah, I don’t think you’d get a configuration. There’s too much other stuff in here to get it.

You’d have to dissolve it. When does it become dangerous? If you had about a million times that dose rate, then it would kill you in an hour or so. These beads are about 2% uranium. The glaze on this fiesta ware is probably almost pure uranium. So what is a dangerous seabird per hour? A million microsieverts, yeah. And we’re at 33. And this thing is howling like crazy. It’s a sensitive instrument. Don’t worry if you get your Geiger counter, which is one of the best, because this one is dialed for an actual nuclear event.

It is very sensitive, but it can also measure to dangerous levels. Most of the other instruments out there, they will tap out at trivial doses like that. Show us something even more radioactive. Oh, now we’re getting into the business section. Even just the tiny little bit there is already 3-4 times as much as on that whole plate. That’s several grams of uranium on the plate versus just specks on the watch. Yeah, back in the day they were painting dials for planes with radium. And the ladies that were painting it, they licked their brush to get a nice line on there and they were getting cancer from it.

Oh, so it is kind of bad for you then. Radium, uranium, right? This stuff, you’d have to eat like macroscopic quantities for it to be something. This stuff is, like I said, 3 million times more radioactive than the uranium. So in summary then, we’ve learned today that pretty much, no matter where you were to attack within here, the effects would be largely localized and minimal, presuming that things are as they say they are. Well, that’s for the enrichment part of it. If you had a nuclear reactor, hard enough to spread things around, that definitely would be a problem.

All right, well I want to thank you guys for coming out. If you guys want to get one of these Geiger counters or scintillators, check out the link in the description below and I’d encourage you to check out the many videos we’ve done with Kai, the radiation guy, where he explains what the hazards are in a potential nuclear fallout situation, how you can protect yourself and how you can detect that radiation with this device, which he created for that specific purpose. And I will just finally say, there’s a lot of these devices on the market that don’t measure what they claim to, which is why you created this device in the first place.

So I want to thank you guys for coming out. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Hopefully, I don’t have to have you back again because my brain is in pain right now. All right, take care. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at CanadianPreparedness.com where you’ll find high-quality survival gear at the best prices, no junk and no gimmicks. Use discount code preppinggear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive but the prepared thrive. Stay safe. [tr:trw].

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