Surely You're Choking, Mr. Feynman!

I haven't been on this forum in ages. As far as I know (after doing some searches on this board,) this scenario is original.

It begins with the germs that cause pneumonia, and their deleterious effects on one Richard Feynman, who in OTL was a very brilliant physicist: discover of quantum electro-dynamics, popularizer of physics and the investigator into the O-rings that caused the Challenger shuttle disaster and its subsequent coverup.

The POD involves Feynman's time in Los Alamos during the Second World War, and involves a particularly pressing problem of communication between Los Alamos, where the atomic bomb was being designed, and the Oak Ridge facility in Tennessee, which was the facility where the fissionable uranium (U235) was being separated from its isotopes. (I won't give the technicalities here; you can find it in Feynman's book.) The point is, Oak Ridge didn't really know what they were doing with the stuff, and that if it were placed closely enough together, it would melt down or explode.

In OTL, it was Feynman who was sent to Oak Ridge, after the physicist Robert Christy contracted pneumonia. In this ATL, Feynman falls ill and Christy is sent to Oak Ridge. Christy is not given all of the calculations by Feynman due to his illness and, despite all of his attempts to convince them otherwise, is ignored by Oak Ridge--with catastrophic results...
 

Cook

Banned
Oak Ridge didn't really know what they were doing with the stuff, and that if it were placed closely enough together, it would melt down or explode...is ignored by Oak Ridge--with catastrophic results...

Atomic explosions aren’t as easy as just putting a lot of Putonium or Uranium together and having it go ‘bang’; just ask the North Koreans.

If enough material were placed close enough together it would cause a fission chain reaction and release lethal levels of radiation, but there would not be an atomic explosion. This is what killed scientist Harry Daghlian at Los Alamos in 1945.

For an atomic explosion to take place the Plutonium had to be compressed into a much smaller volume than the required mass occupied naturally; hence the high explosive shaped charges that encased the Plutonium core to generate an implosion to compress the radioactive material. In the case of Uranium, sufficient mass had to be combined (along with an initiator) fast enough for a fission reaction to take place before the heat generated by the fission would cause a (small and non-atomic) explosion that would break apart the mass.

So mishandling of nuclear material at Oak Ridge could have had a catastrophic result if you were in the same room as it at the time, but it would not destroy the facilities or delay the program.
 
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Flubber

Banned
I see you've read Feynman's autobiography...;)

Read, but not understood it.

Feynman traveled to Oak Ridge with the full backing of Oppenheimer. The managers at Oak Ridge were told repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that Feynman spoke with Oppenheimer's voice and that anything Feynman told them to do must be done.

Anyone traveling to Oak Ridge in place of Feynman would have had the same backing and the same level of knowledge concerning radiological precautions.
 
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