What Do Nuclear Scientists Do? - By MITK12Videos
Transcript
| 00:03 | put the safety doors on manual override . I cannot | |
| 00:05 | do that hard to get out . Mhm . Mhm | |
| 00:17 | . In my group , we study and develop materials | |
| 00:19 | to make nuclear power safer . If you want to | |
| 00:21 | do a neat demo , we can actually make some | |
| 00:22 | stainless steel from scratch and fire up the ark melter | |
| 00:25 | . Yes , I definitely want to do that . | |
| 00:26 | Okay , so we have a few projects in this | |
| 00:31 | lab . One of them is to produce what I | |
| 00:33 | call the fuel cladding of the future element that we | |
| 00:41 | use to make fuel cladding , which protects the fuel | |
| 00:44 | from the water and keeps it all together . At | |
| 00:46 | Fukushima , the simultaneous earthquake and tsunami knocked out the | |
| 00:51 | reactor and its backup safety systems so the reactor wasn't | |
| 00:54 | able to keep the core cool . The fuel got | |
| 00:57 | so hot that it boiled the surrounding water into steam | |
| 01:00 | , which reacted with the zirconium and the fuel rods | |
| 01:02 | . Unfortunately , when zirconium reacts with steam , it | |
| 01:05 | also makes hydrogen gas and it's the hydrogen gas that | |
| 01:09 | exploded . We're developing new combinations of zirconium and stay | |
| 01:13 | in the steel that don't react with steam to make | |
| 01:15 | hydrogen . So this right here is a zirconium steam | |
| 01:19 | oxidation facility . We take different outlines of zirconium , | |
| 01:22 | cut into little pieces , then put them through Hanging | |
| 01:26 | on a bunch of strings in this chamber right here | |
| 01:28 | and then send in steam at 400°C to simulate what | |
| 01:32 | would happen in a nuclear reactor in an accident condition | |
| 01:35 | is a second project in which we can measure material | |
| 01:38 | property changes as they happen during radiation . Using a | |
| 01:41 | technique that's kind of a mouthful we call a dual | |
| 01:44 | Hetero Dean transient grading spectroscopy . These are critical properties | |
| 01:58 | from materials to survive a nuclear reactors . These experiments | |
| 02:02 | have typically taken months to years for people to do | |
| 02:05 | . And now for the first time we can explore | |
| 02:08 | material properties like stiffness and how well heat flows through | |
| 02:11 | materials . Using this bench top experiment and take an | |
| 02:14 | experiment that used to take years and do it in | |
| 02:16 | hours . That's gonna help us design new materials to | |
| 02:19 | make safer reactors . Our labs coming up with the | |
| 02:28 | first way that we know about , we can actually | |
| 02:30 | measure the stored energy , tiny tiny amounts of energy | |
| 02:33 | . We're talking micro jewels that usually you can't even | |
| 02:36 | see . We can take tiny pieces of these materials | |
| 02:39 | smaller than a grain of sand . And using a | |
| 02:42 | nano calorie meter or an energy measurement device on a | |
| 02:45 | chip . We can tell how much energy radiation has | |
| 02:48 | left behind and therefore measure the amount of damage to | |
| 02:50 | the material . So the big contraption you see before | |
| 02:55 | you is our home built and home building vacuum atomic | |
| 02:58 | force microscope . We don't want anything to stick to | |
| 03:00 | anything in a reactor because then you might get this | |
| 03:03 | uh the technical term for what you get is crude | |
| 03:05 | , believe it or not , stands for chalk river | |
| 03:08 | unidentified deposits . All it is is it's corrosion products | |
| 03:11 | that stick to the fuel rods and get super radioactive | |
| 03:14 | . It's one of the big problems and reactors . | |
| 03:16 | Today , we think we have a way to solve | |
| 03:18 | it . The atomic force microscope actually brings a little | |
| 03:21 | piece of this crowd in contact with the material and | |
| 03:23 | measures how hard it is to pull it off and | |
| 03:26 | that's the stickiness that we're measuring . But we have | |
| 03:28 | to test it out in the lab in this sort | |
| 03:30 | of contraption to know if we're right . Yeah . |
Summarizer
DESCRIPTION:
OVERVIEW:
What Do Nuclear Scientists Do? is a free educational video by MITK12Videos.
This page not only allows students and teachers view What Do Nuclear Scientists Do? videos but also find engaging Sample Questions, Apps, Pins, Worksheets, Books related to the following topics.
GRADES:
STANDARDS:
