On july 16th 1948 in a remote desert outside san antonio new mexico the first atomic bomb
was successfully detonated at the trinity site the nuclear blast was so intense it fused the desert
sand into glass and you can still find some shards of that radioactive green glass if you visit the
site today since then 13 000 nuclear devices have been constructed and more than 2 000 detonated
with just how many nuclear devices there are it's not surprising that nuclear knowledge
has spread far and wide even states like north korea on the brink of starvation and collapse
seem to be able to make nukes and the internet is full of how-to's on how to make an at-home
nuclear actor with all this publicly available knowledge it's worth asking could your average joe
with no formal training or special security clearances build a nuclear device just know that
by getting this far into the video you're already on a dozen government less and let's jump in if
you ever find someone on youtube talking about how to make a nuclear bomb they usually only explain
how to build a bomb from all the components but building a nuke is actually pretty easy it's
getting your hands on all the components that's the hard part that's because nuclear devices
start with the nuclear not the device this lesson brought to you by your 4th grade english teacher
the foundation for most nuclear bombs is uranium it's the heaviest naturally occurring element
and when split it can provide a tremendous amount of energy there are about 40 known uranium mines
throughout the world but most uranium comes from these 10 mines in canada australia niger
kazakhstan namibia and russia now before you think about sneaking into a russian uranium mine and
finding yourself in a real-life gulag let's talk about how much raw uranium you need to make a bomb
uranium occurs naturally in three different isotopes u-234 u-235 and u-238 the good news
is you'd only need one of these isotopes the bad news is the one you need is by far the most rare
u-235 is the only isotope useful for making a weapon but it makes up less than one percent
of natural uranium if you were to try to make a bomb from natural uranium there just
wouldn't be enough of that u235 to sustain a chain reaction and reach a supercritical mass
conventional nuclear bombs like the ones dropped on hiroshima and nagasaki need to be refined to
about 90 u-235 but according to research out of princeton you could theoretically make a
dirty bomb with as little as 20 enrichment now i'm not sure why these professors were looking
into making a bomb but this is good news for us because we'll have to cut these corners
because a normal person would just never be able to make a hiroshima style bomb you'd need about 60
kilograms of 90 pure u235 that would require about 12 metric tons of natural uranium and 150 000
of electricity just to refine it obviously it would be pretty hard for a normal person to
sneak three elephants worth of ore out of a mine and the refinement process would be a huge pain
but for a 20 pure bomb we'd only need about 2 000 kilograms or about the weight of a toyota corolla
to refine the ore into a usable product it's fed through layers of centrifuges
that separate the three isotopes by their slight mass differences
there's only about a one percent difference in mass so you'd need hundreds of centrifuges and
a few years to make it work but what if we just skip this step and let the government do it for us
uranium needs to be enriched for things other than nuclear weapons like for power plants and research
tractors power plants typically enrich their ore to about three to four percent meaning you'd only
need 400 kilograms of material for an at-home bomb power plants like the palo verde generating
station run through more than 1600 kilograms of fuel a day and with more than 58 nuclear power
plants across the us to choose from you have a lot of potential targets and stockpiles to choose from
now you might be thinking that a james bond infiltration of a nuclear power plant is near
impossible but it's not as hard as you might imagine in april 2009 president obama warned the
danger that terrorists could get their hands on a nuclear bomb was the most immediate and extreme
threat to global security and while american facilities are moderately well defended according
to analysts at sites in dozens of other countries around the world the security measures in place
for enriched uranium and plutonium are literally no more than a night watchman and a chain-link
fence stealing uranium in some parts of the world is about as hard as high schoolers sneaking into
their schools at night and stealing nuclear material isn't just a hypothetical possibility
it's a proven reality in the last three decades the iae the body responsible for policing the
world's uranium supplies has documented 18 thefts of large enough amounts of plutonium or enriched
uranium to make a dirty bomb and suspects dozens more thefts where countries literally convicted
individuals of uranium theft but denied the cases to the international community in virtually all of
the known cases no one had even noticed uranium was missing until it was later seized suggesting
that many other thefts have gone undetected the uranium needed for a dirty bomb could fit
in a suitcase and isn't radioactive enough to be dangerous or easily detected by border officials
all this means is that if a person was committed enough there are dozens of facilities across the
world where you could break in in the dead of night and take all the uranium you needed
once you have the fuel building the weapon is actually pretty straightforward
studies by the pentagon have found that if individuals can get their hands on uranium
or plutonium it would be fairly easy to make at least a crude nuclear bomb today making a bomb
doesn't require some manhattan style project in fact even back in the 1940s more than 90 percent
of the manhattan project was devoted to making the nuclear material not making the bomb and that was
before the basic principles of nuclear bombs were as widely known as they are today according to the
pentagon today someone that has never had access to classified material could design and build a
crude nuclear explosive device and they'd only need basic machining tools that are easy to buy
to make a bomb all you have to do is figure out a way to compress the nuclear material this is
normally done in one of two ways the first is the gun method the gun is considered the simplest
way to build a nuclear weapon and it's basically just ramming two pieces of nuclear fuel together
the weapon is made of a tube with two halves of nuclear fuel at opposing ends this was how the
nuclear bombs dropped on japan worked an explosive is placed behind one half and when detonated the
nuclear charge races down to the other end once the two halves meet the chain reaction starts
and the explosion takes place the charge in the little boy explosive dropped on japan only needed
to reach a thousand feet or 300 meters a second and this would be fairly easy to achieve with
legal explosives like tannerite in the confined tube the second approach is the implosion method
in this approach the nuclear fuel is shaped into a sphere and the explosives are placed around it
when these explosives are detonated the force compresses the fuel setting off the chain reaction
so yeah it turns out building a nuclear device isn't actually that hard but before you go off
and get any crazy ideas just remember this video was for educational purposes only if you liked
the video be sure to check out some of our best uploads here and remember there is always more to
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