Timeline for Why didn't Germany succeed in building a nuclear bomb in second world war?
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12 events
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| Dec 27, 2017 at 21:21 | history | edited | Alexandre Eremenko | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 27, 2017 at 20:19 | comment | added | Jon Custer | Indeed, aps.org/units/fhp/newsletters/spring2015/oak-ridge.cfm indicates that Nichols book is incorrect. Why Phelos Didge would burn a building down to reprocess wire remains beyond me. They must have been very short of competent engineers at the time, when simple melting and casting would have sufficed. | |
| Dec 27, 2017 at 18:51 | comment | added | Peter M. - stands for Monica | @JonCuster - You are talking about the silver from calutron in Y-12, I am talking about Phelps Dodge facility in NJ which manufactured the silver wires. See calutron-Construction. ---- BTW: Can you substitute your claim Y-12 used 10-15% US electricity? Link I found says it was 0.9%, just FYI. | |
| Dec 27, 2017 at 18:28 | comment | added | Jon Custer | @PeterMasiar - the only floor in the facility was the concrete foundation to support the racetrack. | |
| Dec 27, 2017 at 18:21 | comment | added | Peter M. - stands for Monica | @JonCuster - Floors in the facility which manufactured the wires from silver was burned down, not the calutrons. BTW your claim that Y-12 used 10% of total US electricity was disputed and estimated at 200MW ~ 0.9% (which is still a lot, for a single facility in a country fully manufacturing). | |
| Dec 27, 2017 at 18:05 | comment | added | Jon Custer | @PeterMasiar - the racetracks were absolutely not burned down. The magnet windings, silver wire on steel frames, were returned to the UD Treasury for processing. One can easily find pictures on line of the frames stacked for shipment. Burning down the building would have made the task monumentally harder (and wasted a good building). | |
| Dec 27, 2017 at 15:23 | comment | added | Peter M. - stands for Monica | @JonCuster - The scale of the of the complexity and cost of Y-12: for electromagnetic isotope separation, they used 12 300 tonnes (1 tonne = 1000 kg = 2204 lb) of silver (copper as strategic material was not available in necessary quantities) converted to wires for the coils. After manufacturing the wires, facility was burned down to extract spilled silver from the ashes. | |
| Dec 27, 2017 at 15:09 | comment | added | Peter M. - stands for Monica | Exactly: the cost. To have feasible nuclear bomb, you need plutonium, which has to be manufactured in a breeder nuclear reactor, which is easy to bomb target (and extremely expensive to build). To develop the nuclear technology, you also need heavy water, and sabotage of it's production (in Norway) was one of the most successful sabotage operations of WWII. | |
| Nov 4, 2016 at 16:11 | comment | added | Jon Custer | I agree with (b) - there is no way that Germany (or Japan) could have produced the necessary amounts of enriched uranium or plutonium. At one point, the Y-12 plant (uranium isotope separation) was using something like 10-15% of the total electricity produced in the US (which was substantially more than produced in Germany). Germany never started down that road in the first place - there was no path to a real atomic bomb without isotope separation or plutonium production reactors. | |
| Oct 28, 2016 at 19:05 | history | edited | Alexandre Eremenko | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Oct 28, 2016 at 18:59 | history | edited | Alexandre Eremenko | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Oct 27, 2016 at 22:24 | history | answered | Alexandre Eremenko | CC BY-SA 3.0 |