Heavy water

From what I've read, the Germans had gone down the wrong path on the road to an A-Bomb. They weren't anywhere close to getting it and the heavy water was pretty much irrelevant.
 
How vital was heavy water to the Nazi bomb project and would we see more battles around Norway?
It was vital for their reactor program, a reactor that was a Chernobyl or Windscale waiting to happen.

They had no real control rod setup, and their plan for SCRAM the Reactor would not have worked
 
The Nazi atomic program was hampered by shortages of all types of materials and lack of interest by senior Nazi party officials. Hitler’s distaste for “Jewish Science” forced some of Germany’s brightest scientists (e.g. Albert Einstein) into exile.

By the end of the war, Nazi scientists (e.g. Heisenberg) had almost finished building an atomic pile in a secluded town in Baden-Wurtemboug. See “Atomkellar.”
 

Driftless

Donor
There's a timeline POD.... A Nazi reactor that goes Chernobyl (with less ability to contain it) near the end of the war. What's the impact: atomic energy use in general and the use of the bombs on Japan?
 
There's a timeline POD.... A Nazi reactor that goes Chernobyl (with less ability to contain it) near the end of the war. What's the impact: atomic energy use in general and the use of the bombs on Japan?


Now the Haigerloch reactor was a fraction of the size of the other two disasters I listed, so would have been bad for the local area, maybe even to Stuttgart, depending on the wind
 
Had the German physicists organized a viable project the Heavy Water would have been important. There is a reason the French government paid for the purchase of all Norwegian Heavy Water at the end of 1939 & shipped every ml. of it to France in March 1940.
 
Had the German physicists organized a viable project the Heavy Water would have been important. There is a reason the French government paid for the purchase of all Norwegian Heavy Water at the end of 1939 & shipped every ml. of it to France in March 1940.
I'm just cruious, does anyone know why was Norway producing heavy water at this point ?
 

Ramontxo

Donor
I remember one detective novel of the Twentys / Thirties (maybe a Philo Vance one?) Were the plot went around the industrial fabrication of Heavy Water. But cannot recall it's name sorry...
 
Worth noting that post-war, Werner Heisenberg claimed that it was a deliberate mistake, an attempt on his part to sabotage the project by faking the numbers. Not everyone believed him- Niels "It's not even wrong" Bohr being exceptionally sceptical, because he knew Heisenberg as a rotten experimenter from before the war, notoriously sloppy and capable of getting it that hopelessly wrong anyway. (Not as bad as 'Thumbs' Dirac, but close.)

As for why, both on behalf of Scandinavian physicists and their research, and oddly for spa related purposes, I believe it had sales value as a sort of atomic super mineral water. In the thirties, anyway.
 
I'm just cruious, does anyone know why was Norway producing heavy water at this point ?

Physics labs & the chemical industry were experimenting with it. I can't remember if there were any commercial uses then. The French shipment in 1940 was approx 180kg & is supposed to have been many months product. I don't know what happened to the French Heavy Water, but in June there was a Brit Brigadier collecting physicists in France and packing them onto a ship to Liverpool. Can't recall his name at the moment, but he had orders that got him any transportation or other assistance he desired.
 
If the Germans were going down the plutonium path it was very important. Heavy water is used as a moderator in reactors that produce plutonium. Light water is a great moderator but absorbs many more neutrons then heavy water. The neutrons are needed so one can be captured by a U238 atom. This will then decay to Pu239. If they were going to enrich uranium then it’s really not needed. The odds of them developing a usable fission device before the war ended was IMHO about the same as the sea mammal succeeding or the Japanese winning the Pacific war though.
 
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There's a timeline POD.... A Nazi reactor that goes Chernobyl (with less ability to contain it) near the end of the war. What's the impact: atomic energy use in general and the use of the bombs on Japan?
The Haigerloch experiment didn't even result in a functional reactor (i.e. did not reach critical mass for sustained nuclear fusion) and therefore posed no Chernobyl-type risk at all. Maybe it could have done so with a longer war or with higher prioritizing by the Nazi leadership.

I don't think a Chernobyl-type incident before Hiroshima would prevent the latter; without the Hiroshima precedent it's "statistical deaths" in the middle of a world war, basically invisible with 1945 methods. Civilian use of nuclear energy might be a different matter, though even then I could easily see people warning of a "repeat of Haigerloch" being dismissed as kooks.
 
If the Germans were going down the plutonium path it was very important. Heavy water is used as a moderator in reactors that produce plutonium. Light water is a great moderator but absorbs many more neutrons then heavy water. The neutrons are needed so one can be captured by a U238 atom. This will then decay to Pu239. If they were going to enrich uranium then it’s really not needed. The odds of them developing a usable fission device before the war ended was IMHO about the same as the sea mammal succeeding or the Japanese winning the Pacific war though.

Not only not close, their separation and refining process actually removed what little Pu exists. following describes tests done on some of the Haigerloch Uranium cubes

To date the materials, they used the ratio of thorium-230 to uranium-234 to determine the last time the uranium underwent chemical processing. Such separations typically remove impurities and decay products such as thorium-230. The isotope ratios pin the dates to late 1943 for the cube and mid-1940 for the plate, suggesting that the samples were in fact part of Germany’s nuclear program during World War II. They also help confirm the order in which the Germans adopted various reactor designs—first plates, then cubes.

From the ratios of the various uranium isotopes— 234U, 235U, 236U, and 238U—Wallenius and coworkers learned that the samples were not enriched in 235U. Increased levels of this low-abundance, fissionable form of uranium would have made it easier to sustain a nuclear chain reaction.

The amount of another uranium isotope, 236U, taken together with the amount of plutonium-239, serves as an indicator of a sample’s past neutron bombardment. This is because 236U forms when 235U captures neutrons, and 239Pu forms when 238U captures neutrons and undergoes beta decay. If the samples had been exposed to a large number of neutrons, as would be found in a working nuclear reactor, their levels of 236U and 239Pu would have thus been elevated relative to their natural abundances.

The amount of 236U in the samples was so small that Wallenius and her coworkers couldn’t detect it with their instrumentation and had to send the samples to Australia and Austria to be measured by accelerator mass spectrometry, a more sensitive technique.

Not only were the levels not elevated, the 239Pu level was even lower than would be expected naturally. Wallenius suspects that the low 239Pu resulted from the chemical separations used to process the ore.

“When uranium is chemically processed, most of the other elements are removed,” she says. “That means also at least some of the plutonium coming from nature was removed.”


https://cen.acs.org/articles/93/i39/Nuclear-Forensics-Shows-Nazis-Nowhere.html
 
From what I've read, the Germans had gone down the wrong path on the road to an A-Bomb. They weren't anywhere close to getting it and the heavy water was pretty much irrelevant.

Well, there were two paths from which an atomic weapon could have been produced: Production of plutonium (through nuclear transmutation in a reactor), and enrichment of uranium (through centrifuges or a gaseous diffusion plant). The Germans progress in building a reactor was largely an exercise in futility, as they were never able to produce enough heavy water for it. The Allies blew up the Norsk Hydro plant in November 1943, and they also blew up the Leuna plant in August 1944.

Their efforts at uranium enrichment were somewhat better. The Germans managed to produce some relatively advanced centrifuges by the end of the war, but they were too little too late.

Not particularly someone in the German team had screwed up the math rendering any possibility of a German bomb rather mynute

That was the test performed by Walter Bothe on the graphite needed to act as a neutron moderator. His tests seemed to confirm that graphite could not be pure enough to satisfy the requirements.
 
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