Overglyph; here.
Correct me if I am wrong, but it appears the Germans goofed by a factor of 3x? Their pile was too small and their subsequent calculations based off it, would have still been a blind alley dead end result. They seem to have miscalculated the scale up needed. Fermi got it right at his first time attempt. Was that pure luck?
Fermi had multiple reactors in 1941 for example before the famous one that was working at the end of 1942. In his patent
Patent number US2708656A
he describes how the use of an exponential reactor helps. No one could get it right in their first attempt. It isn't possible. Except in the case of the British if they already have the knowledge. ZEEP was I believe the first reactor that the Canadians/British explicitly built themselves. The only way that was possible was if they had intimate knowledge of what Fermi and the other American scientists did.
He may have even had one in 1934 before nuclear fission was even discovered yet.
Currently, I need to ask
How did you get the 'factor of 3x'? At the moment, I am
trying to run the next German reactor through the OpenMC Monte Carlo code in the hope to see if it would actually work. Hopefully, I can come up with a actual result.
By subsequent calculations are you referring to the supposed Heisenberg calculation that stated they needed 745 kg more heavy water and uranium? A likely result in that case is that he wasn't right, I agree, but I would still like to know what the heavy water uranium requirements for a reactor would have been. (they would probably still be very close even if the next one was a failure it may be absolutely negligible time wise)
Please re-read the bolded bits you wrote, and then consider your position.
Remember, the actual a-team of 20th century physicists alerted their political leadership of the possibility of an atomic bomb on 2 August 1939. Heisenberg was six years late.
The Germans were trying to acquire plutonium 239 for a bomb. This necessitates an implosion type bomb, as a gun-type bomb is not practical for a bomb using plutonium-239. The Germans had not really ever considered design for a bomb, certainly it seems that they hadn't figured out the idea of an implosion type bomb. Apparently they had not got that far to consider this. It would have been more productive to work on this problem concurrently with trying to get a working reactor
Not that they couldn't work it out eventually, mind you. If their first reactor goes critical in 1945, that gives them a lot of lead time over the British. The British who would probably be utterly helpless to even get a bomb if it weren't for the Americans holding their hand.
The British thought in 1941, they'd be able to get a bomb as early as 1943 according to your wikipedia article.
What I know is that there is plenty of evidence that Heisenberg either sabotaged the German program or simply screwed up. You want to believe otherwise that's your prerogative, still no idea what this has to do with Sealion mind you.
If you do not share the evidence, then there is no evidence. That is the way it works.
Supposedly, a implosion type bomb is more difficult than a gun-type bomb. Otherwise, I would say that the effort would be negligible for the Germans, and they would have a bomb very soon from when they lost.
The Germans had not even begun work on for example explosive lenses, I gather, a necessary development for a bomb. I guess they at least knew what a neutron reflector was. The tamper is made out of natural uranium.
Of course, I guess there is little point in putting any effort into that if you don't have the plutonium for a bomb.
And if Hitler had elected to put more resources into the nuclear program rather than wasting them on extraneous rocket projects, and other resource drains, the Germans would possibly have gotten a working nuclear reactor far sooner than we are talking about now, as it would have fast tracked the experiments.