Peaceful Use of Nuclear Power Before the Bomb

How plausible is this? I think that it would be more probable than something like the Manhattan Project, but I could be wrong. Nonetheless, one of the steps to building the bomb would be making a nuclear reactor pile of natural or weakly enriched uranium, certainly something far easier than the Gadget.
 
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nbcman

Donor
There were multiple reactors built during the Manhattan Project. Chicago Pile 1 was the first reactor in 1942 that had a peak power output of 200 W - and no shielding! Chicago Pile 2 (a few kilowatts) and Chicago Pile 3 (up to 300 kilowatts) were constructed in 1943 and 1944. There were reactors in other locations such as the Oak Ridge X-10 graphite reactor (4 MW in 1944 plus plutonium production) and Hanford (3 constructed of 6 planned 250 MW reactors in 1944/1945 plus plutonium production).

EDIT: Note that some of the above outputs are thermal outputs and not power generation outputs.

For more info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-10_Graphite_Reactor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
 
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Usually there has to be a need before a new technology is adopted. In the US there was no need since coal and oil was cheap and plentiful. There is plenty of coal in Europe, too. Without a wartime (hot or cold) need to quickly develop nuclear technology it seems unlikely that anyone would bother.
 
The technology for reasonably safe design and operation of a nuclear/fission power plant is different from making a bomb or breeding plutonium. Absent WWII you might see power reactors before bombs, but I doubt it. During the war there were not enough resources to put in to power plant design and testing and the bomb program. The scientific/engineering resources were vast, but had limits... Postwar actually the biggest push for power came from the USN for subs that could stay down "forever".
 
Japan has two separate nuclear research programs during WW2. The Imperial Japanese Navy program focussed on building ships’ engines, but never got very far due to material shortages.
 
Usually there has to be a need before a new technology is adopted. In the US there was no need since coal and oil was cheap and plentiful. There is plenty of coal in Europe, too. Without a wartime (hot or cold) need to quickly develop nuclear technology it seems unlikely that anyone would bother.
People recognized the theoretical advantages of nuclear energy even in the 1930s (i.e., that you could get much more energy per unit input of fissile material than of coal), so much like solar energy there would probably still be a trickle of interest and investment over time. Rather more pertinently, however, navies (as pointed out by @riggerrob and @sloreck) immediately recognized that nuclear energy offered major operational advantages over oil, just like oil had over coal and coal over wind, and would probably have invested relatively heavily in developing nuclear energy for that reason.

Also, you're underestimating how much military tension was present in Europe and elsewhere in the world prior to World War II and the Cold War. There was more than enough incentive for the Germans, Japanese, Americans, Soviets to invest in nuclear technology for their militaries.

Nope.
Making an economic, commercial reactor is hard. Making a bomb is actually easier.
Building commercial reactors is hard, but I'm not sure I would actually say that building a bomb was easier; as pointed out already, the Manhattan Project built a number of reactors prior to building any bombs, and the German program came damn close to putting together something that could reach criticality (see this article from this month's Physics Today for a nice analysis). It's not too hard to see an alternate history where the discovery of fission leads to a gradual development of reactors and their refinement by both academic and military programs, with bombs, though recognized as a possibility, continually deferred as being both very expensive and of questionable utility, and the whole thing ending up with reactors developed first.
 
People recognized the theoretical advantages of nuclear energy even in the 1930s (i.e., that you could get much more energy per unit input of fissile material than of coal), so much like solar energy there would probably still be a trickle of interest and investment over time. Rather more pertinently, however, navies (as pointed out by @riggerrob and @sloreck) immediately recognized that nuclear energy offered major operational advantages over oil, just like oil had over coal and coal over wind, and would probably have invested relatively heavily in developing nuclear energy for that reason.

Also, you're underestimating how much military tension was present in Europe and elsewhere in the world prior to World War II and the Cold War. There was more than enough incentive for the Germans, Japanese, Americans, Soviets to invest in nuclear technology for their militaries.


Building commercial reactors is hard, but I'm not sure I would actually say that building a bomb was easier; as pointed out already, the Manhattan Project built a number of reactors prior to building any bombs, and the German program came damn close to putting together something that could reach criticality (see this article from this month's Physics Today for a nice analysis). It's not too hard to see an alternate history where the discovery of fission leads to a gradual development of reactors and their refinement by both academic and military programs, with bombs, though recognized as a possibility, continually deferred as being both very expensive and of questionable utility, and the whole thing ending up with reactors developed first.

Reaching criticality is not that challenging. Lots of idiots have done that by mistake. It’s reaching and maintaining safe criticality that is the problem.

Building a research reactor that puts out hundreds of watts thermal is an order of magnitude easier then building a several hundred megawatt commercial reactor. Type of reactor, BWR, PWR, type of fuel, radial and axial core flux, measuring power in source range, intermediate and power ranges, metallurgy for core, fuel assemblies, control rods, finding out about neutron embrittlement, fission product gasses in fuel assemblies, alpha T, type of moderator, figuring out neutron life cycle, types of corrosion and erosion in core, safety systems, how to refuel, etc. And that’s just some basic crap for the core. Now you need all the secondary systems. Plant chemistry, all kinds of other stuff.

Little Boy was simple. Very simple. It was the Pu implosion bombs that were a little more challenging.
 

trurle

Banned
The technology for reasonably safe design and operation of a nuclear/fission power plant is different from making a bomb or breeding plutonium. Absent WWII you might see power reactors before bombs, but I doubt it. During the war there were not enough resources to put in to power plant design and testing and the bomb program. The scientific/engineering resources were vast, but had limits... Postwar actually the biggest push for power came from the USN for subs that could stay down "forever".
The plausible early civilian application for nuclear energy is nuclear icebreakers. Soviets build ten of them, starting construction from 1953, 4 years from first Soviet nuclear bomb test.
 
Building a research reactor that puts out hundreds of watts thermal is an order of magnitude easier then building a several hundred megawatt commercial reactor.
As pointed out earlier, the Manhattan Project did involve building reactors that "put out several hundred megawatts" of thermal power. For plutonium production, of course, but in theory you could have generated a non-trivial amount of power from that, if it had made any sense.

Little Boy was simple. Very simple.
Yet in practice not so easy. Hanford's B Reactor, with 250 MW of thermal power, was operating by October 1944, the better part of a year before there were any deliverable Little Boys at all. Yes, you couldn't really use Hanford B as a power reactor, not practically, given the design flaws that resulted from, well, a lack of experience. But despite Little Boy being "simple" it still took longer to actually build and of course still consumed a considerable fraction of the resources put into the Manhattan Project overall. "Simple" doesn't mean "easy" and "complex" doesn't mean "hard".

The point, in any case, is that evaluating the difficulties of practical reactors versus bombs is made quite difficult by the fact that building bombs was an A+ priority wartime project in the United States and not very far behind in the Soviet Union after 1945, whereas reactors never had anything like that kind of priority or investment, except as they pertained to the bomb project. It's not like they just ignored them, obviously, and the Navy realized the advantages fairly quickly, but after the war no one was going to put Manhattan Project-level resources into developing reactors. So the best you can do is look at it and see that nuclear scientists did develop reactors of a fairly considerable scale before they developed bombs, which suggests rather the opposite conclusion to the one you suggest. Yes, developing a reactor is hard and involves solving a lot of problems; so was developing even "simple" Little Boy bombs.

(Plus, of course, a research reactor is still a "peaceful use of nuclear energy," even if you never get a watt of electricity out)
 
Interesting comment about Soviet nuclear icebreakers. One of the early ones, the Lenin was scrapped prematurely due to radiation contamination because a galley sailor decided to use live steam to get rid of grease on some pans. Unfortunately the steam loop he cracked a valve on was the "hot" loop, he and several other died from radiation poisoning, and the ship eventually had to be scrapped.
 

trurle

Banned
Interesting comment about Soviet nuclear icebreakers. One of the early ones, the Lenin was scrapped prematurely due to radiation contamination because a galley sailor decided to use live steam to get rid of grease on some pans. Unfortunately the steam loop he cracked a valve on was the "hot" loop, he and several other died from radiation poisoning, and the ship eventually had to be scrapped.
Funny story, but i cannot find the proof of this event really happening. A reference?
 
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