Might have something to do with centrifuges?
Wasn't something like that eventually going on at the plant in Washington State?
It might; I knew there was a third process but I’d forgotten what it was. All three processes, electromagnetic separation, centrifuge and gaseous diffusion, were considered feasible means of separation but the industrial plant necessary for each was simply out of reach of all other nations in the world. So we pursued all three, and built the massive plants for them.
To my knowledge, Oak Ridge did all the Uranium separation and had all three plants. But if building one plant was beyond the reach of the rest of the world, building three giant separation plants wasn’t enough for us. We decided to go yet another route to making an atom bomb, which required yet another giant industrial complex. The Hanford, Washington, facility did no uranium separation. Instead, they built graphite moderated reactors to make Plutonium, which can be chemically separated from the Uranium slugs. The only real difficulty there is that the process had to be done mechanically by remote control since Plutonium is highly toxic.
So not only did we decide to build a Uranium bomb, we decided to make a Plutonium bomb, too. The scientists were pretty sure the Uranium bomb would work, but it just took so long to get enough U235 for it. The actual detonation process for Pu239 was more complex, since it involved carefully timed explosive compression of a Plutonium sphere. That’s what the Los Alamos lab was created for.
I look back at “the American Century” and am saddened by what we have today. At the beginning of the century, we built the Panama Canal through jungles, mountains and swamps were everyone else had failed. In the middle of the century, during the greatest war mankind has ever waged, we took what were just arcane formulae on physicists’ blackboards and built atomic weapons. Near the end of the century, we put men on the moon and returned them to earth.
I look now at the BP tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico and wonder: Where has our competence gone? Where is American excellence? All around us, whether in the headlines in the paper or just dealing with the scheduling secretary at the doctor’s office, we are surrounded by incompetence. I just assume the person I am dealing with is incompetent at what they do now. I don’t even wonder why they are incompetent.