Thread

1. kjander79 · 1790965857 · focus · HN ↗

   This is an awesome read, and likely correct in the narrative, but the cubes they have at hand to study have a bit of a provenance problem - how do we know they were the ones used for the German research?

   At any rate, getting a reactor running still was a long way from the industrial capacity the Americans used to get a working device. Industrial capacity Germany just didn't have late in the war. And after Afrika Korps' defeat, they weren't getting any easily accessible materials anymore.

   1. monocasa · 1790967283 · focus · HN ↗

      We have very good tracking of these kinds of things, just based on the material properties of the samples.

      To the point where we found some material in what purported to be fresh ore that had clearly been in a reactor at one point, but couldn't track down which particular reactor it matched. For a while there was a bit of a scare that some nation had a reactor unknown to international authorities that was selling its waste products on the open market.

      Turns out there was just an ore deposit that had exactly the correct conditions to be a low grade (but completely natural) nuclear reactor in Oklo, Gabon.

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