Science is an iterative process of experiments. Science is also a process that depends on intuition and deduction to a remarkable degree. Both these factors mean that science is much cheaper when it is slower than it is in a crash program.
Let us consider fission. In OTL Fermi understood Pontecorvo's strange results as being from slow neutron absorbtion instead of fast neutron absorbtion, but misunderstood it as transmutation of U238 to Np239, which it was, but not also as U235 to various fission products.
Noddack suggested fission as well as transmutation to explain the chemistry results of the resulting products. Noddack could not perform the experiments to confirm this because she did not have a neutron source. At that time, neutrons were produced by expensive radium irradiating beryllium with fast neutrons.
The experiment was performed and it took about half an hour to confirm that it was fission from the massive recoil energy released as compared to the much less energetic absorbtion process. Let's assume as our POD that someone in America paid for this experiment as a speculation in technology for generating energy. He met somebody on a train and fell into conversation, perhaps.
So he quietly buys up uranium byproducts from radium manufacture (available as sodium uranate on very reasonable terms) and stockpiles them, and meanwhile starts funding the experiments on neutron absorbtion measurements and isotope separation that the Manhattan Project funded, but slower and cheaper.
For instance, Liquid Thermal Diffusion, Electro Magnetic Separation, and Centrifugal Separation were all taking place at American universities in this period. Gas Pressure Diffusion was still only in Germany. Other schemes hadn't yet been proposed.
When 1939 rolls around and WWII starts, we know that U235 is the fissionable material, we know that we can separate it in LTD plants and upgrade it in EMS plants, and that we will get a fast fission bomb out of it if we have enough U235.
We also know that centrifugal separation will be cheap enough to build power reactors, but we can't build centrifuges stable and fast enough at this time. No semiconductors yet, and vacuum tubes aren't reliable enough. When the vacuum tube burns out the centrifuge is no longer being stabilised and more or less explodes. So uranium is still too expensive to compete with coal, as in OTL.
We still don't know about plutonium separation, we don't know about Wigner distortion of the graphite lattice, we don't know about fusion implosion processes, we don't know how to make a separation membrane for Gas Pressure Diffusion, we don't know a reasonable separation process for plutonium or any of that.
We do know how to make a bomb. And Germany has just invaded Poland.
Let us consider fission. In OTL Fermi understood Pontecorvo's strange results as being from slow neutron absorbtion instead of fast neutron absorbtion, but misunderstood it as transmutation of U238 to Np239, which it was, but not also as U235 to various fission products.
Noddack suggested fission as well as transmutation to explain the chemistry results of the resulting products. Noddack could not perform the experiments to confirm this because she did not have a neutron source. At that time, neutrons were produced by expensive radium irradiating beryllium with fast neutrons.
The experiment was performed and it took about half an hour to confirm that it was fission from the massive recoil energy released as compared to the much less energetic absorbtion process. Let's assume as our POD that someone in America paid for this experiment as a speculation in technology for generating energy. He met somebody on a train and fell into conversation, perhaps.
So he quietly buys up uranium byproducts from radium manufacture (available as sodium uranate on very reasonable terms) and stockpiles them, and meanwhile starts funding the experiments on neutron absorbtion measurements and isotope separation that the Manhattan Project funded, but slower and cheaper.
For instance, Liquid Thermal Diffusion, Electro Magnetic Separation, and Centrifugal Separation were all taking place at American universities in this period. Gas Pressure Diffusion was still only in Germany. Other schemes hadn't yet been proposed.
When 1939 rolls around and WWII starts, we know that U235 is the fissionable material, we know that we can separate it in LTD plants and upgrade it in EMS plants, and that we will get a fast fission bomb out of it if we have enough U235.
We also know that centrifugal separation will be cheap enough to build power reactors, but we can't build centrifuges stable and fast enough at this time. No semiconductors yet, and vacuum tubes aren't reliable enough. When the vacuum tube burns out the centrifuge is no longer being stabilised and more or less explodes. So uranium is still too expensive to compete with coal, as in OTL.
We still don't know about plutonium separation, we don't know about Wigner distortion of the graphite lattice, we don't know about fusion implosion processes, we don't know how to make a separation membrane for Gas Pressure Diffusion, we don't know a reasonable separation process for plutonium or any of that.
We do know how to make a bomb. And Germany has just invaded Poland.
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