Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Do fission reactors occur naturally?

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

Daniel and Jorge talk about whether fission reactors are found in Nature Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen, and I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, Jorge, where do you get all your energy from?

What do you mean? Well, you know, you do this podcast, we write books, you run a TV show, you survive as a parent. What powers all of that activity? Fear, maybe? No, mostly just bananas. Is that it really just bananas? There's no other secret sauce. You think I have like an arc reactor in my chest, like Iron Man?

It does seem like a superhuman level of activity sometimes. Maybe I should be a Marvel character like Banana Man. procrastiman. No, I like banana man. I'll contact Marvel. I'll tell them it's very appealing. All right. I hope they don't slip up. Hi, I'm Horham, a cartoonist and the creator of PhD comics. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine. where we have a working nuclear reactor. Oh, my goodness.

Is this out of your garage or like in your office or do you have an actual lab? No. Under the chemistry building, there is a functioning nuclear reactor which you can go and visit and it like glows blue and everything. Is that a good idea to put it under like a campus full of thousands of kids? Well, I don't know, but we weren't going to put it under the physics building. That's why it ended up under the chemistry building. Oh, I see.

Chemistry people are more expendable. I didn't say that. I'm just happy to not have it in my building. They're just denser and can absorb all of the, you know, particles that come out. But it's pretty cool to visit and just like imagine all those crazy particle things happening right down in there. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which we do get right down in there. We talk about all of the crazy, amazing things that are really happening out there in the universe.

This chaotic buzz of insanity, which is reality, is. the subject of the podcast and the thing that we try to explain and we shy away from none of it from the tiniest little things to the hugest vastest mysteries of the deepest cosmos we attack all of it and explain all of it to you that's right because the universe sort of doesn't sleep there's always something going on in the universe making energy exploding crashing into each other and it's amazing to think about the idea that we could one day understand all of it that is a crazy idea i've never heard before that the universe might even sleep. You know, like, imagine if, like, all of physics went to bed at night and just, like, stopped happening. Take a nap. Like a little cosmic nap.

You're like, geez, universe, take a break for a minute. Let us catch up. We're still figuring things out. I mean, that's what's going on inside of black holes. It's just, you know, where the universe goes to take a nap. Oh, yeah. It's just like a Google where they have nap pods. This is where, like, particles can go to take a break finally. Like, these photons have been going for billions of years without stopping, who take a load off. You think the universe needs a vacation or something? You think the universe is tired? It seems to be pretty active and picking up on energy with its expansion. That's true. The universe does seem relentless. And so there's a lot going on in the universe and sometimes we wonder how does all this energy go out into the universe. That's right,

because all this stuff around us contains an incredible amount of energy. All the matter around you are these tiny little systems bound together with incredibly strong, forces which, if manipulated in just the right way, can release them in incredible bursts of energy. Yeah. And somehow throughout the years, humans have figured out how to sort of take advantage of this idea of releasing the energy that's stored inside of the bonds of the things that make up the universe. And sometimes for good reasons and sometimes for not so great reasons. That's right. And you can see around you in the night sky, for example, fusion reactions happening that last millions and billions of years. At the heart of stars, of course,

is a kind of a nuclear reactor. Down here on Earth, we don't see that as often, thankfully, but we've been able to sort of engineer similar stuff happening so we can take advantage of it and power our air conditioners. Yeah, anytime that you hear a pop out in your daily life, it's probably some sort of a chemical bond breaking up and releasing energy out into the world. Does that happen to you a lot? You just like turn around and hear something pop.

Isn't that what happens every time you hear a car running? I have an electric car now, so it's totally silent. Oh, interesting. Now you can sneak up on people. That's exactly why I got it. I can sneak up on them and steal a lick of their ice cream cone or something. Oh, my goodness. That is a little disturbing.

You're like the ice cream bandit, the electric ice cream bandit. I've never actually done that. But now every time I'm going to get in my car, I'm going to think about maybe doing that. But yeah, it's sort of an interesting idea to think about the humans sort of harnessing this power, this ability to kind of release the energy. inside of everyday matter, right? I guess we started it with fire. Fire maybe was the first sort of maybe, you know, chemical energy causing reaction that we came up with. Yeah, I think about it as if matter is like a bunch of tiny little springs bound together. And if you find just the right way

to release those springs, you can capture all that energy and use it for something else. And exactly, fire is just that there are chemical bonds stored within the carbon and the other elements within wood, for example, and heat will release them in this chain reaction. That's the magic where some energy is released and then it causes the neighbors to release their energy, which causes the neighbors to release their energy. And that's the magic because you don't want to release the energy of just like one atom. Yeah. And so we figured out fire and then eventually humans invented, I guess, explosives and gasoline and engines. And so we're pretty good, it seems, at kind of releasing that energy, at least the chemical kind. Yeah, we are. And all these things so

far also happen in nature, right? Like fire is started by lightning. And most of the chemical chain reactions that humans have taken advantage of, you can also see happening in nature. Yeah. And eventually we were able to harness the energy inside of atoms, right? I mean, we figured out fusion and fission for both reactors and bombs. That's right. And I actually grew up in the town where the bombs were invented in Los Alamos. So this like capturing the power at the heart of an atom is sort of essential theme. to my childhood. Is that why there's a certain glow about you, Daniel?

No, that's all the plutonium I ate as a child. Oh, I see. That's different. All right. Well, yeah, we made fusion and fission bombs. And as you were saying, Daniel, fusion happens a lot in nature. It happens naturally every time there's a sun. And every time you look out into the night sky, each one of those stars is a fusion reactor.

There's basically an ongoing fusion bomb at each one of those pinpoints in the sky. That's right. It's awesome because it's a fusion bomb into continuous explosions. that's also held in place by gravity. So it's like a stable reaction, which, you know, we've discovered it's not that easy to engineer, but the universe has done it.

It's amazing to me that stars exist and that they last for so long. Yeah, definitely the night sky would be a lot less prettier without fusion and stars in it. I mean, what would Van Gogh have painted in Starry Night? The blacky, blacky night.

Yeah, so stars are fusion, and so we know that happens out in nature a lot, but vision is different than fusion, right? It's sort of the opposite of fusion. That's right. Fusion is when you squeeze together light nuclei to make heavier ones, like squeeze hydrogen together to make helium. But fission is when you start with something which is already big and heavy,

like uranium or plutonium, and you crack it into smaller nuclei, which also releases energy. Right. And so fission is the one that I think maybe most people associate with nuclear power, right, here on Earth, that humans have been able to engineer, right? I think most nuclear power plants and the nuclear bombs that we've made and that people worry about are fission, right? That's right. All of the nuclear power plants are fission. We're working on fusion plants, but nobody's really made that work yet. Our nuclear weapons initially were fission because it's simpler and easier to get to work.

But then more recently, they are fusion powered because it's much more destructive. Actually, some of our nuclear weapons are fission bombs that are used just to trigger a fusion reaction. So they're like fission and fusion. It's a fusion of fission and fusion. It's insane. It's like how do you light a fusion bomb? You need a fission bomb just to get it going. Just give it a little extra fizz.

But yeah, I guess there's sort of this weird thing that, you know, we can't quite make fusion power happen here on Earth, but it's happening all over the universe. But then we can make fission bombs and fission reactors here on Earth. We've gotten pretty good at engineering those. But you maybe don't quite see them out there in the universe as much. Yeah, fission reactors take really special conditions, which you don't. find out there in the universe. And it makes me wonder, like, are humans the only ones who are doing this? Are these reactions only happening in our laboratories? And so today on the podcast,

we'll be asking the question, can a fission reactor happen naturally? And Daniel, this isn't one of those episodes where we actually like tell people how to make a fission bomb or something dangerous out there. It's not another one of those episodes, is it? No, this is not in the super villain how-to series. Fortunately, check out our YouTube series on how to become a super villain using physics. Check out our lessons on our website. First, adopt a white cat.

Second, buy a volcano. Third, shave your head. What? You got to shave your head? I'm out. Nothing's worth that. Let's be honest. We're almost at the balding stage anyway. Not me.

I'm 46 and I still have a vibrant head of hair, not a single gray. It's all that plutonium. It's all that plutonium, exactly. Yeah. But anyways, so I guess the question is, like, can, we know that a fusion reactor happens naturally in nature. It's at the center of every star. But the question is, does a fission reactor happen naturally in the universe? Like, can you have a fission star even out there in space?

Yeah, we actually did a whole episode about can you have stars that are run by fission? That was a listener question, which is super awesome. And we decided it might be possible, but it was very unlikely to arrange the circumstances necessary. And what we'll discover in today's episode is that fission is delicate and you have to have just the right conditions arranged in just the right way, just the right time to make it happen. Or you need clever human engineers. Well, it seems kind of weird to me, right? Because it seems generally that it's easier to break things than it is to put them back together. So it's kind of weird to think that fission is sort of like rarer or harder to achieve.

Yeah, that's true. Although the products that you need for fission, the heavy stuff are generally more rare than the products you need for fission. which is the light stuff. Like remember, the universe still mostly hydrogen. We've been working at it for 14 billion years and still most of the stuff in the universe is just what it started as, which is hydrogen. All right. Well, as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had thought about this question and knew whether nuclear fission reactors can happen in nature. So Daniel went out there into the internet to ask people this question. So thank you denizens of the internet for answering these questions. And if you are a denizen of the internet and have

not yet answered our questions. We want to hear your voice, especially if you have a super awesome, unusual weird voice that people will like to listen to. But even if you don't, and you like answering random questions, shoot us a note to questions at danielanhorpe.com. Here's what people had to say. I don't think nuclear fission can occur naturally because you always hear about how lighter elements for like fuse to form heavier elements and that's how all the heavier elements in the universe have been formed. But you never hear. anything about the opposite reverse and like there's no splitting, there's no creation of more sort of hydrogen that you hear of? My initial response was yes, nuclear fission occurs in nature

naturally and it was just a trick from nature that we've copied. But on the other hand, I don't see nuclear bombs spontaneously going off in nature underground all the time. So maybe not. But I can also So imagine that in high-energy occurrences like supernovae or other high-energy occurrences, stuff gets bombarded with neutrons and atoms split. So I still have to go with yes, but I'm not totally certain. I would like to think so, but I think most nuclear vision that I know about is something man-made. So maybe? Since we force it and split atoms in nuclear reactors, it sounds like it'd be a bit scary if it happened anywhere on Earth naturally.

Yes, I believe it can. I think there's an example of it having happened two something billion years ago in continental Africa somewhere. I don't know of any other examples, but I believe it can happen naturally. I'm not quite sure about that one. The strong forge, which I'm pretty sure, keeps those nuclei together, some electromagnetic forces keeping it together. It would take a lot to oppose that, so I'm thinking maybe in some sort of extreme gravity situation, but still, I still think those nuclei are too small, and the strong force is too strong to have some sort of nuclear fission occur naturally. I think it can occur naturally. I don't know how to explain it, and I don't know how. I do not know if nuclear fission occurs naturally, but I assume it does because of the vast

quantities of different elements the universe has. So I'm sure what's happened before in the universe. All right. On the whole, it seems like most people thought that yes, the answer was yes, that you can have fission out there in nature happen naturally. Yeah, and I think this is motivated by the general feeling that, like, wow, it's a big universe and everything you imagine might happen is probably out there happening somewhere. They've heard our podcast so much that now they just assume that anything that sounds crazy

is happening somewhere at least in one spot in this infinite universe. And it's a good motivation. You know, astrophysicists take advantage of that all the time. They can't like do experiments like what happens when two neutron stars collide. You can't build a neutron star collider. So you just look out in the universe and say, hey, let's watch and see if we spot it happening. and then we can do our experiment effectively. Yeah, so I guess why do we even need to hire you, Daniel?

Somebody's got to eat the plutonium, man. Somebody's going to make the banana jokes. All right, so let's talk about this question of whether or not nuclear fission reactors can happen naturally out there in the universe. And so first of all, I guess let's step through it in more detail. What is nuclear fission? So fission is when you break up heavy nuclei into smaller atoms. So everything above iron, everything that's heavier than iron that has more protons in the nucleus than iron, if you crack it in half, then you release energy and you make two smaller nuclei.

Right, because I guess all matter, all the stuff we're made out of is made out of atoms. And an atom is a nucleus with electrons flying around it. And so the only difference between like uranium and carbon is just how much stuff is in the nucleus, right? Which is just protons and neutrons. Exactly. And the thing that defines an element is the number of protons in it. So if you add a proton, you change the charge because protons are charged. And then you need another electron.

And that changes the fundamental chemical reactions that it can be involved in. So that changes sort of the identity of it. And you can add neutrons if you like. Neutrons are neutral so they don't change the charge and don't require another electron. But it does give you another isotope. And as you add protons and neutrons, things get heavy. And there are some arrangements that are stable. They can hang out basically forever.

But there are lots of these arrangements which are not stable, which will eventually just sort of break up on their own. We had a whole fun podcast about really heavy elements and which ones are stable and which ones are not stable, which you can check out if you're interested in the nuclear physics of it. So I guess you're saying the identity of atoms has all, everything to do with the protons in it. So like hydrogen just has one proton in the middle.

But uranium has like 235 protons typically. Oh, hundreds of protons in the. nucleus. Yeah, uranium has 92 protons in it, but it occurs in nature in a couple of different isotopes. Uranium 235, where 235 refers to the number protons and neutrons together. So if you do some quick math, you can discover uranium 235 has 92 protons and 143 neutrons stuffed into it. And there's also uranium 238, which comes with three more neutrons. And so most of the uranium out there is U-2-38, which is much more stable. U-235 is more rare and much more useful, actually, for fission.

Right, right. But, you know, they were not as good as U-2, I think. They've been working on it for a lot longer, though. Still waiting to have that breakthrough album. There are a lot more heavy metal, maybe. They're a no hit wonder. No, I'm just kidding. I think what you're saying is that, you know, uranium has 92 protons and a whole bunch

of neutrons. And it's sort of like Legos, right? You can just add these building blocks and you get different atoms, which means that at some point you could potentially break them apart to get two of the lighter elements, right? Yeah, exactly. You break up that nucleus and then you share those protons, those 92 protons, between the products, and so you get things made out of smaller numbers of protons. Yeah, and so that's a fission reaction.

That's nuclear fission. That's right. And nuclear fission, mostly we do it with uranium 235 and sometimes with plutonium 235. 239, where again, the number is the total number of protons and neutrons together. And so in most nuclear reactors that generate power, you have either uranium 235 or plutonium 239. All right. And so somehow breaking up the inside of an atom, the nucleus of an atom into smaller elements, somehow that releases a whole bunch of energy, right? Which is kind of weird to think about it. You think about it, right? Like, why would breaking something release energy? Yeah, well, because

there's energy stored in there. You know, you can imagine if you like mechanical analogies, you can imagine like that they're stored in there with a bunch of springs that are really tautly wound together. And when you break it, what happens is that the springs release and they shooed the parts out and their parts are now moving really, really fast. So the energy that was stored in that spring has now been transformed into the motion of the particles that are flying out. And that's essentially what's happening here, except instead of having like literal springs, you have gluons, the carriers of the strong force that are tying these things together. There's a lot of energy in those bonds. And when you break it up, that energy is

released and the particles come out moving really quickly. I guess maybe it might help if we maybe talked a little bit about what's actually going on. Like if I break a banana in two or if I break my cell phone or something, like I don't get a lot of energy getting released, right? Like things are breaking and bonds are breaking, but there's not a lot of like where does that energy come from actually? Yeah, well, if you do break a banana in half or you break your cell phone in half, you are breaking bonds. Those are chemical bonds, right? Those are bonds between atoms and the atoms are not changing. You might be taking a molecule and breaking it into its atoms or you might be just sort of like cracking a crystal, a long, you know, a part of its

lattice and so there are bonds between molecules that are being released. But you don't notice any energy being released there because the energy is really, really small. But when you break a nucleus in half, then the energy released is huge. And the reason it's much bigger is because the strong force is involved. And the strong force is, well, it's really strong. So it has a lot of energy stored inside these atoms. It's much stronger than the electromagnetic force, which is one that's holding your banana or your cell phone together. I guess it's kind of like you say,

there's a spring holding these nuclei particles together, and so suddenly if you detach those springs, they're going to spring out, right? All that sort of stretched energy has to go somewhere. Yeah, it's sort of like a jack in the box, right? And you open the top and boom, everything pops out. Or it's like, you know, one of those cans full of snakes. So you open it up and like, bang, everything flies out.

And that's exactly what has. happens here, you crack open the nucleus. It was held together sort of delicately. You crack it open and everything flies out with a bunch of energy. But it's sort of like a reverse jack in the box, right? Because the springs are pulling stuff together, not sort of being compressed and wanting to explode. Yeah, exactly. Here in this case, the bonds are holding them together. So they're sort of trapped in a bound state where the bonds, you know, have a potential well where everything is like trapped inside. You can think of that sort of as like the box that's holding the jack in the box together or the can that's holding the snakes inside.

But inside, there are things with a lot of energy that are desperate to get out. They're trapped into a stable configuration currently, but if you destroy the barriers that are holding them in, they will fly out. I wonder if it's like, you know, wrapping something up in bungee cords and holding something big together with bungee cords or rubber bands, and then when you cut a rubber band, you know, it snaps and they go flying out. Yeah, exactly. Take a huge ball of rubber bands and cut it in half with a circular saw.

then the rubber bands are going to go everywhere. They're not just going to, like, lie down nicely on the table. All right, well, that's nuclear fission. That's what happens when fission happens in an atom. And so let's get into whether or not it happens naturally in nature and whether or not we've ever seen it happen. But first, let's take a quick break. Ah, come on.

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Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon.

This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's four. former professor, and they're the same age.

And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed.

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Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up, a shoe. with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases,

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We're talking about nuclear vision and how to make it at home, right, Daniel? With some simple ingredients. That's right. First, call up the NSA and book your room because you're going to be staying with them for a long time. Make sure you get a spot with a window. Oh, man. I wonder if there are people from the NSA listening to us. The NSA is always listening.

It's just not counted in our podcast listenership, which I don't think is fair. I see, right, right. We could have one more add it to our data. Unless they're listening to the ads, in which case, hey, it's all cool. It's all click-throughs. But yeah, we talked about fission and what it is. It's when you break up a heavy atom into lighter atoms when you redistribute the number of protons in the nucleus. And so the question we're asking today is, can that happen naturally in nature?

And more specifically, can you like have a reactor of it that creates a bunch of energy happen in nature? exactly because vision itself like an atom breaking into smaller pieces and releasing energy that happens all the time like uranium just sitting around is unstable and those atoms will crack in half and they will fly apart and lots of atoms are unstable and every time that happens you call it radioactive decay it really is fission but what we do inside a reactor is not just have like one atom break in half or two atoms break in half we have something special we have a chain reaction a self-sustaining reaction sort of like fire. That's a very special arrangement which only in this century we were able to engineer to make happen. So you're saying that vision by itself

does happen in nature like things break apart in nature all the time but it's getting it to like be self-sustaining and have it sort of be like a fire where it's constantly happening that's harder or like

did you see in the sun for fusion that's harder to do. Yeah exactly. It's like the difference between having a spark and having a fire. You know we've all been there at a campsite

shooting sparks at something and trying to get a fire started, it's not always easy to get a fire started, right? You can have sparks, which are evidence of energy being released, right? The same chemical process is at work. But to get a fire started, you need to get enough heat so that you're igniting more fuel, which can then release more heat, which can ignite more fuel. So it's a self-sustaining part, which is quite tricky to happen, even for a fire sometimes, and especially difficult for a fission chain reaction. So this happens in nature for fusion. like in the sun and the stars, it seems to happen more easily for fusion than for fission.

That's right. But again, that's probably just because there is a lot of fuel for fusion around, right? Fusion requires light elements and there are a lot of light elements in the universe. It's mostly hydrogen out there. And so that's fuel for fusion. All right. So you're saying that fission, making fission happen constantly is hard, but we figured it out here on Earth, right, in our nuclear reactors and in our nuclear bombs. So how do we do it? So the key things you need to make a self-sustaining fission reaction, you need two things.

One is you need enough fuel sort of close to each other because you need one vision reaction to trigger the next one, which triggers the next one, right? Sort of like if you're trying to start a fire, you don't spread your logs out everywhere. You get them close together so the heat from one can ignite the next one. And then you also need something to get the neutrons that fly out to be at the right speed because the neutrons to fly out don't always come out at just the right speed

to trigger the next reaction. So you need one, a critical mass and two, you need this thing called a neutron moderator which makes the neutrons go with just the right temperature. Yeah, those neutrons are not as neutral

as they seem sometimes. You get to pull them back sometimes. Well, they're just so excited to get out there into the world and do something. You're like, hey, neutron, look, let me give you some career advice, okay?

You don't want to burn out immediately. All right, so let's tackle each of these in turn. So you say we need critical mass because in a chain reaction fission, in a fission chain reaction, you have like one atom splits open that releases a bunch of energy. And then that energy comes out as particles, I guess, or photons. And then those hit other heavy nuclei, which then causes them to break. And then those release more energy, which causes other things to break. So that's what you mean by a chain

reaction, right? Yeah, exactly. And what happens when you break up the uranium, for example, is you get the fragments, you get the like lighter elements, and then mostly you get neutrons. Like you get some energy in terms of photons, but then also you get these neutrons. And that's critical because it's the neutrons that are going to trigger the neighboring atoms to break apart. So for example, you take a neutron and you shoot it into a uranium atom

and it will make it unstable. It will like give it enough energy so that instead of being like a nicely built piece of Lego, it's like, it's a little wobbly, and then it's going to break open. And so it's the neutron that triggers the reaction in the neighbor. Interesting. So I guess first of all, when a atom breaks apart, why does it release a lot of neutrons and not like protons or something else? Yeah, it actually shoots out a bunch of particles.

And so sometimes you get neutrons, sometimes you get gamma rays. You can also get protons. Mostly the protons like to cluster together into these other nuclei. So we call these nuclear fragments. They go off and form little daughter particles. But you can sometimes get protons out. And also the neutrons that you shoot out. they will eventually decay because neutrons are not stable.

So you will eventually get protons coming out also. All right. So you're saying that's pretty interesting because that's one thing I didn't know is that I always thought that when fission reactions happen, it's like the energy from the shooting particles break the other ones apart. It's really more like you're shooting off hairs and they break the camel's back of other nuclei. Yeah. It's like little bullets, right? These neutrons are like little bullets and they're shooting out and they have just the right interactions to mess up the neighbors.

And so it's sort of like, you know, divorces spreading throughout a friend group, you know. People get grumpy, they get divorced. They start complaining to their friends about their marriages. And their friends are like, oh, that sounds familiar. Maybe we should get divorced. Yeah, it's like I was saying, it's like it's shooting hairs that break the camel's backs all around. And then when those camels break apart, it shoots off hairs that break other camel back, right? Exactly.

And so what you need is a critical mass. When those neutrons fly out of the fissioning atom, they need something to hit. And so you need to have enough fuel sort of packed densely together in order to make it so that you can have a self-sustaining reaction. And critical mass is probably like a phrase you've heard before. And that's essentially the most important component in having a nuclear reaction. Right. Because I guess if the camels are too far apart, you know, one of them will just break apart and send hairs flying up. But the hairs won't hit the other camels.

So you need them packed close together. I see that you prefer to talk about camels than divorces. I'll go with you. Yeah. It's a bit of a bummer. Camels is just a more fun image. Are camels monogamous, by the way? Do they mate for life?

Yeah, let's talk about camel divorce. I'm just trying to fuse it all together rather than fission our analogies into two different topics. How many analogies for fission can we come up with? We've already broken bananas and jack in the box, inverse jack in the boxes and camels and divorce. All right. So you need critical mass. We get a chain reaction of vision. And you also said you need to slow down the neutrons.

have. Yeah, the problem is that when the neutrons fly out, they have a lot of energy. So they're called fast neutrons. So just moving really, really quickly. And even if you pack your uranium pretty tightly, the neutrons that come out are moving too quickly to ignite the neighboring uranium nuclei into breaking. Because the faster they're going, the more the universe is compressed for them. And so they have a smaller chance of hitting those neighbors. So what you need is something to slow down those neutrons to just the right speed so they have a high enough chance of hitting a nucleus and triggering another reaction. Oh, interesting.

It's about like the probability of hitting another atom, right? Like if the hairs from the camel are flying off too fast, they'll just miss all the other camels. But if it's going slow, then there's a bigger chance that, you know, a camel will walk into the path of one of these hairs. Yeah, because you don't want your neutrons to fly all the way through your fuel and escape with their energy. You want them to deposit that energy in some other nuclei so it can trigger another reaction. So basically you have to make your fuel opaque to neutrons rather than transparent. And so to do that, you've got to slow them down because fast neutrons will escape and slow neutrons will be captured by neighboring atoms and trigger more reactions.

All right. So you need critical mass and you need to slow down your neutrons. And if you do that, then you can get a fission chain reaction to happen. And that's what gives you nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors. That's right. That's mostly the design for a nuclear reactor, not a nuclear bomb. And so if you're a nice person out there and looking to build the next generation of nuclear reactors and provide clean, green energy to the future, then we support you. If you're out there trying to build a nuclear weapon, then, you know, check out another podcast. Yeah, you're done here. You can basically turn this off now. But this was first done in 1942 in Chicago by Enrico Fermi. And it was not an easy thing to accomplish this right balance of having the right mass of. fuel and just the right sort of neutron moderator, take of the neutrons at the right speed.

It's really quite delicate. So that's how you make a nucleon fission reactor. And so now the question that we started with was, does it occur naturally in nature? Are there stars out there? Are there things that are naturally reacting with fission constantly? So let's get into that question. But first, let's take another quick break. Ah, come on.

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Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors, so you can work, Create and boost productivity all on one device. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam, maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor, and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

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or wherever you get your podcast. All right, can a fission reactor happen naturally on this universe, Daniel? I guess the question is, is there somehow, you know, like we see stars out there that are constant fusion reactors? Do we see, I don't know, some weird concentration of uranium or plutonium that is constantly also reacting and giving off energy. Yeah, well, what you would need are both of the elements, right? You need some critical mass of uranium or plutonium, and you'd need something to moderate the reaction so that it can self-sustain, rather than just like burning itself out by shooting

these neutrons out and losing all of their energy. And so in our episode about fission stars, I think we concluded that there isn't enough uranium in the universe to make like dense blobs of uranium that could do that. But, you know, there are deposits of uranium here. here in the crust of the Earth's surface. And so you could imagine like, hmm, could there just like happen to be really rich deposits of uranium in the Earth surface and just the right arrangement to somehow like create natural vision reactors? Right. Because I guess you could get a chain reaction going with any amount of uranium.

But I guess if you only have like a teaspoon of it, it won't last very long, right? So you're saying like maybe here on Earth we could have enough uranium together that we do get this sort of nuclear constant reaction. action going. Exactly. And this is something that in 1956, a businessist was thinking about the name is Paul Corota. And he predicted that it would be possible. He said, if you have a configuration in the earth's crust where you have exactly the right amount of uranium in the right configuration and like water leaks in and provides just the right kind of like neutron moderation, then you could get a nuclear reaction going just like by itself spontaneously underground. I guess I'm surprised that it doesn't happen more often. Is it?

the case that, you know, we have a lot of uranium here on Earth, and it's, it's fissioning, it's breaking up apart, but it's not causing a chain reaction. So it's not sort of like burning up really quickly. That's exactly right. Uranium just sitting around is constantly fissioning and constantly breaking up. And sometimes it's even in critical mass, but there's not a neutron moderator. And so you need that second piece to make the self-sustaining reaction happen. Cool. And so that's happened here on Earth. So someone predicted it, but have we found an actual natural fission reactor on Earth? Yes, actually, somebody has figured out that billions of years ago deposits in the Earth in Gabon in the African continent did experience a nuclear self-reaction. Basically, there was a reaction

happening underground on Earth. And the way they discovered is really quite a fun story. What happened? Uranium is a very special and important material, right? And we don't want the wrong people to get their hands on it. So people do very careful accounting of like the amount of uranium. And remember that uranium comes in two flavors. There's the U-235, which is the important one you need for doing fission. And then there's U-238, which is much longer lasting and much less useful. So typically what you do is you mine uranium and then you try to get the U-235 out of it. You can do like centrifuging or any sort of like, you know, processing to get it out. And most natural

deposits have a pretty small amount of it. It's something like 0.7%. So there was this material that they mined in Gabon and they were processing it in France and they discovered, hold on a second, it's really, really low in U-235. And they were wondering like, did somebody steal all the U-235? Like, where did all the U-235 go? It's like this material has already been depleted of the fission material. Because I guess most of the uranium on Earth was sort of created at the same time. And so they all have the same sort of ratio of the two kinds of uranium? That's right. And it's like a big clock.

You know, billions of years ago, there was more U-235 on Earth. And it's just depleting. Like, it's just constantly fissioning and breaking up and turning into other stuff. So the U-235 fraction in deposits is dropping all over the Earth constantly. And, you know, where was this made? When did this clock start? Well, we think that this stuff was made like in supernovas or in the collisions of neutron stars billions and billions of years ago. And so it's just been like slowly fissioning into other

stuff very gradually over billions of years. And now, just because of where we are in time, it happens to be about 0.7% of natural uranium. So I guess we assume that all of the uranium on Earth was made at the same time. Like there was one event that created all this uranium. Yeah, mostly or at least, you know, to within a billion years or so. All right. So then we found this piece of uranium rock that had a different ratio of the two kinds of uranium. It had less of the U-235. Exactly. It had less of the useful stuff, the stuff that you could use to do fission. And so first people were like, hold on a second, somebody must have like slurped it out or stole it or whatever.

But then they discovered that all of the deposits from this one mine had this low fraction, that, you know, that most of the stuff was essentially already depleted of what you could use for fission. And so then they started thinking, hold on a second, maybe this is an example of a natural. reactor. Maybe it just sort of like fissioned on its own and burnt out all of the useful uranium. Like it ignited, right? It's like you're looking for coal deposits, but you find some coal that already looks burned out. Yeah, exactly. And so that's exactly what happened. And what they figured out is that there are very rich deposits of uranium in this mine. So like excellent critical mass, just what you need. And that there were cracks in the rock where groundwater could seep in. And so the groundwater would seep in and then surround these deposits and essentially

act like a neutron moderator. So like crack and get inside. And you know, this is something that like engineers spend a lot of time becoming proficient in how to design. But it just sort of like happened accidentally and randomly in this one spot. And it was just in the right way to moderate those neutrons so they had the right energy to trigger this self-sustaining reaction. Wow. So really all you need is like just add water to uranium in the right way and you can get a little nuclear reactor. Yeah, but you need water like internally, right? You can't just like put a chunk of uranium in a glass of water. You need to be internal so that you can like really capture those neutrons and slow them down and before they hit another piece of uranium. So you need like a cracked piece of uranium. You're like

drill holes in uranium first or something. Oh, I see. You need like a little water barrier between different parts of the uranium so that it slows down the neutrons. And then what happens, right? What happens is you produce a lot of heat. And so then the water gets hot and it turns into steam and it boils away and it turns off the reaction. Then it cools down and more water drips in and it starts again. And so they were able to figure out that this thing was on a three hour cycle. It's like 30 minutes of intense fission reactions boiling this water into steam and then like two and a half hours for it to cool down and for water to come back in and for things to kick off again.

Wow. And so this happened for how long you think? This happened billions of years ago for a few hundred thousand years. By counting like how much uranium has been depleted, they were able to figure out that this thing went on for quite a long time. Interesting. You said 100,000 years this was happening? So for 100,000 years?

Hundreds of thousands, yeah. So for a few hundred thousand years, it's somewhere in Africa was unseasonably warm or like the ground, somewhere in the ground or somewhere inside of a mountain. It was sort of like hot. Yeah, it was like. like a few hundred degrees Celsius underground. And over several hundred thousand years,

it consumed the fissile material in like several tons of uranium. Wow. So it was like a naturally engineered nuclear reactor. Exactly. And it was producing crazy radiation, right? It was shooting off particles. And, you know, if it had been really near the surface,

it would, like, caused cancer in any animals or people living nearby. But, of course, it was billions of years ago. But it happened in Africa, so could that have somehow, I don't know, mutated some plant or animal? And here we are. Yeah, this is like an alt version in 2001, you know, like a uranium monolith that like mutates our ancestors and makes them intelligent or, or dumber. Maybe we would have been smarter if this thing had to happen. Interesting. I see.

So maybe we are all really superheroes whose origin are in some, you know, radioactive event. Yeah. The thing I find really interesting is that it's no longer possible. because uranium is naturally depleting itself like this depleted itself really rapidly because of this critical mass and the neutron moderators etc but most uranium just sitting underground is naturally depleting itself not through a self-sustaining reaction just as it sort of falls apart and so on average the uranium around the earth is doesn't have the critical mass anymore to do this this happened billions of years ago because back then it was much richer in uranium 235 it hadn't like fallen apart yet into the lighter elements. Oh, I see. So this couldn't happen again, really, even if you like put the water in in just the right way? No, it couldn't happen again. You don't have the critical mass in naturally occurring uranium ore anymore. Anymore. I mean, not on Earth that we're aware of. Unless there's like a fresh batch of uranium that just landed from a neutron star collision in a neighborhood or somewhere else

on another planet, it could certainly happen. But if there's uranium ore that's sort of of the same date as the ones that we're typically discovering, then it's no longer rich enough for this to happen. Interesting. I see. It's like it's stale. Exactly. Those camels got stale to use your analogy. They got wet or something. Oh, and I see because the kind that we use for like nuclear reactors and nuclear bonds, we have to like refine it, right? We have to make it richer in this special kind of uranium. Hence the famous centrifuges used to make nuclear fuel. All right. So maybe it was once, it sounds like there was only a brief period of time maybe in the history of Earth where a

natural vision reactor could have occurred, but no longer, right? That's right. Now it's just up to us humans to engineer the precise conditions necessary to release this energy from the atoms. But I guess it could have happened in other parts of the Earth, not just in Africa. Like there could have been other reactors that we don't know about yet. And there could be reactors happening in other planets, perhaps, or in other parts of the galaxy. Sure, this is the only one that we have found, but certainly possible that deeper in the

earth or just in undiscovered uranium deposits, there's evidence that. that had happened other times in the history of the Earth. And it certainly could be happening right now on a fresher planet out there, a less stale camel. All right, cool. Well, I guess the answer to the question, can a fission reactor happen in nature? The answer is yes. With the right conditions and the right time and the right place, you can have like an actual nature vision reactor.

How does that make you feel about the quality of human engineering versus just natural randomness? Well, humans were engineered by nature. So I think nature is the ultimate engineer. How about that? Nature should be on all of our papers as well. It should be a Marvel superhero. Nature, nature. And it should be totally naked, right?

On natural. Oh, man. Your mind is going to some interesting places today. Divorce, nudity. Boy, Daniel. You know this is a family-friendly podcast, right? We're not trying to fuse it with other ideas. I apologize.

Clearly, the nature character for Marvel should be a camel. You're right. All right. Well, we hoped you enjoyed that and then got you to think about what an incredible place nature is, right? Where suddenly, for some reason, vision reactors can happen. That's right. So everything that you can imagine is probably happening out there somewhere in the universe. Events are conspiring to create even the most delicate and elaborate scenarios in which the craziest particle interactions can occur. Well, thanks for joining us. See you next time. Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. taking so long. This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, ultra-light, ultra-powerful, and built for serious productivity with Intel core ultra-processors, blazing speed, and AI-powered performance. It keeps up with your business, not the other way around. Whoa, this thing moves.

Stop hitting snooze on new tech. Win the tech search at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo. Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, powered by Intel Core Ultra processors. So you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged. terrorism. Listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school

week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, him, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.