Fabrication of Plutonium Disks

[@Muonium1]

This channel is incredible. I've never seen many of these films before and it surprises me that some of them are actually unclassified. If Alan B Carr really is an employee of LANL I sure hope for his sake they are because I want to see more!

[@ad2181]

Fascinating video. Induction heating into a ring, lathe machining, hydraulic press into cylinder, pressing. Hand sawing a thin cylinder of Pu in a glove box what could go wrong?

[@Tim-Kaa]

Such a cool video! Why was it declassified? It's crazy but from the past readings I naturally understood exactly every process, why it was done, how it was done, why it was done the way it was done, the Pu alloy that was used and what will be done afterwards. And yes, staking Pu sheets together made me very uncomfortable.

[@Obladgolated]

Now this, Mrs. Ricardo is a nuclear warhead. Your job is to take a can of whipped cream, spray the nuclear warhead like so, put a cherry on the top of the nuclear warhead, and place it on this shelf, like so. Do you understand so far? Yes, Mr. Witherbottom.

[@teresashinkansen9402]

Wow never thought I would see Plutonium extrusion.

[@rollbot]

agree! love it!

[@christopherleubner6633]

Crazy that this one is not classified. It shows the steps needed to ensure the piece is uniform. Casting, clean up, extrusion, finishing foarging, and trim lathe. The hacksaw though. Wtf! If anybody is wondering, yup these were parts for the bright flashy thingies, particularly they are for the second stage of a Teller Ullman device before they realized that plain old uranium works just fine.

[@paulelephant9521]

Yeah, the hacksaw in the isolation cabinet and the protective rubber/whatever else gloves looks like the worst job ever, you really don't want to cut your finger!!

[@paulelephant9521]

This whole thing gives me the screaming heeby jeebies, all that plutonium!! It's pretty cazy stuff, constantly changing into something else, you can almost smell the radiation! How did this footage end up on KZbin? I would have thought this sort of information would still be classified?

[@slovokia]

How close to a critical mass are the workmen getting with all this metal so close together? It does seem like a lot of metal in one place.

[@huh4233]

Quantity of fissile material, and Geometry of fissile material. The casting slug they made all those plates from was a big lump in the beginning and wasn't critical. I saw no other billets laying around in that glove box either. Notice the clear Lucite plastic carrier the plates were shown at at the end of the film. That was to protect the handler from the alpha particles being emitted from the Pu.

[@jimsvideos7201]

Remarkable.

[@slovokia]

I assume this is plutonium alloyed with gallium and not the pure metal.

[@denmes]

What is the purpose to make discs in such sofisticated way? why not simply take ingots?

[@mjohnsonmikegmailcom]

I suspect there wasn't a rolling mill available. Rocky Flats, the plutonium "factory" in CO, had rolling mills but maybe LASL had only hydraulic presses?

[@christianweagle6253]

Plutonium has some of the most complicated and troublesome metallurgy in the entire periodic table. It has a large number of phases, with noticeably different properties, and can transition between those phases as a result of thermal or mechanical work, or even just while hanging around. It's also absurdly chemically reactive. The end use of the shape usually drives the particular manufacturing process. Whatever you need to do with Pu, it's going to be a more complicated process than with pretty much any other metal.