4 hours ago
https://gizmodo.com/nazi-germany-couldnt...2000819012
INTRO: According to historians, the Manhattan Project began as a response to Nazi Germany’s perceived lead in nuclear technology. While their reactor never really took off, scholars are divided as to how close they got—and the answer may be that they weren’t at all close to criticality, a new study argues.
In what they call “nuclear archaeology,” researchers conducted a literature review of historical documents on Uranprojekt—Nazi Germany’s nuclear program—and then devised a model to reproduce realistic measurements of its progress. Specifically, the team focused on B8, Nazi Germany’s final, large-scale uranium experiment in 1945.
Two years after the war, project designer Werner Heisenberg claimed that the reactor would have worked with a little more uranium. However, the latest assessment, published today in PNAS Nexus, rejects this estimate, claiming that Nazi Germany couldn’t have built either a heavy water or a graphite reactor.
“Our new nuclear analysis reveals that the B8 required roughly 2 times the uranium and 2.3 times the heavy water to reach criticality, far exceeding Heisenberg’s estimates,” the team, which includes physicists Patrick J. Park and Timothy W. Koeth from Columbia University and the University of Maryland, respectively, wrote in the paper. Those figures are compared with what B8 actually used.
This means the Nazis were far short of the heavy water needed to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. To put it into perspective, B8 would have needed about twice the heavy water that Norsk Hydro—the plant in Nazi-occupied Norway that supplied Germany’s program—produced during the entire war, according to the study.
That’s right—the Heisenberg who oversaw Nazi Germany’s uranium project was the same Heisenberg who revolutionized modern quantum physics... (MORE - details)
INTRO: According to historians, the Manhattan Project began as a response to Nazi Germany’s perceived lead in nuclear technology. While their reactor never really took off, scholars are divided as to how close they got—and the answer may be that they weren’t at all close to criticality, a new study argues.
In what they call “nuclear archaeology,” researchers conducted a literature review of historical documents on Uranprojekt—Nazi Germany’s nuclear program—and then devised a model to reproduce realistic measurements of its progress. Specifically, the team focused on B8, Nazi Germany’s final, large-scale uranium experiment in 1945.
Two years after the war, project designer Werner Heisenberg claimed that the reactor would have worked with a little more uranium. However, the latest assessment, published today in PNAS Nexus, rejects this estimate, claiming that Nazi Germany couldn’t have built either a heavy water or a graphite reactor.
“Our new nuclear analysis reveals that the B8 required roughly 2 times the uranium and 2.3 times the heavy water to reach criticality, far exceeding Heisenberg’s estimates,” the team, which includes physicists Patrick J. Park and Timothy W. Koeth from Columbia University and the University of Maryland, respectively, wrote in the paper. Those figures are compared with what B8 actually used.
This means the Nazis were far short of the heavy water needed to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. To put it into perspective, B8 would have needed about twice the heavy water that Norsk Hydro—the plant in Nazi-occupied Norway that supplied Germany’s program—produced during the entire war, according to the study.
That’s right—the Heisenberg who oversaw Nazi Germany’s uranium project was the same Heisenberg who revolutionized modern quantum physics... (MORE - details)