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The mine that built the atomic bomb
- rurban 6y agoThe Russians didn't need the Congo uranium, because they had the East-German Czech uranium from the Erzgebirge (Wismut) in equal quantities. Also very secret those times.
- tpm 6y agoAnd mining the uranium (at Jachymov) were partly German war prisoners and later Czechslovak political prisoners.
- missedthecue 6y agoI believe the majority of uranium comes from Kazakh mines, a former Soviet state.
- rurban 6y agoEast-Asian uranium (Kazhak) could have indeed provided the majority of the USSR uranium needs, with 60% stocks. But in reality the GDR (Wismut) did provide 60% of the USSR uranium and the CSSR (Jachynow, Pribram) 14%. The German output was 5x higher than the Russian output in their mines. Only after the German uranium support stopped, they ramped up Kazakhstan, which is now leading the world production by factor 4 over everyone else. Source: Urangeheimnisse, Rainer Karlsch, Zbynek Zeman, 2002 BTW: the death rate by lung cancer was about 100x higher there than in Hiroshima/Nagasaki in absolute numbers. In relative numbers Colorado/USA was the worst btw.
- runeb 6y agoI’m surprised at the amount of Uranium the US needed (for just the Manhattan project?) the US secured 1,200 tonnes of Congolese uranium, which was stockpiled on Staten Island, US, and an additional 3,000 tonnes that was stored above ground at the mine in Shinkolobwe. But it was not enough. US Army engineers were dispatched to drain the mine, which had fallen into disuse, and bring it back into production. Under Belgian rule, Congolese workers toiled day and night in the open pit, sending hundreds of tonnes of uranium ore to the US every month.
- _n_b_ 6y agoNatural uranium is 0.7% U-235, and enrichments of 80%+ are needed for U-based weapons (like Little Boy). The enrichment process used during the Manhattan project (electromagnetic and then gaseous) not perfectly efficient, and there are losses during conversion, but assuming 100% efficiency that means just Little Boy required 8 tons of raw U. If you add up all the work going on, all the experiments, all the piles (reactors) off consuming uranium, this figure doesn’t seem too surprising to me.
- bbarnett 6y agoFrom the article: Mines in the US and Canada were considered a “good” prospect if they could yield ore with 0.03% uranium. At Shinkolobwe, ores typically yielded 65% uranium. The waste pile of rock deemed too poor quality to bother processing, known as tailings, contained 20% uranium.
- ivann 6y agoThose are the yields of uranium in the ore. The 80%+ needed is the quantity of the Uranium-235 isotope.
- sandworm101 6y agoIf it were 65% uranium, the mine itself would be a massive nuclear reactor. (A situation that did happen elsewhere in prehistory.) It would heat up and into a red-hot cauldron. 65% is the richness of the ore not the percentage of uranium in the rock overall.
- timothevs 6y agoQuite interesting, do you have an article, or a paper about the prehistoric episode you mentioned? I’m genuinely curious.
- intotheabyss 6y agoThe only naturally occurring nuclear fission reactor was found to be in Oklo, Gabon in Central Africa and was thought to be active about 1.5 billion years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
- growlist 6y agoNot a single picture of the mine or general area of its location?
- wantoncl 6y agoConsidering the efforts they made to classify it, that's not surprising. Remote, possibly jungle, not particularly hospitable in any event, doesn't help people to document it.
- ivann 6y agoWeirdly there is a picture and 7 reviews (4.7 stars) for the mine on google map. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Shinkolobwe/@-11.045198,26.5541917,4599m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m8!1m2!3m1!2sShinkolobwe!3m4!1s0x19712444dae3f85f:0x6b49fc032f5c5cf2!8m2!3d-11.0506909!4d26.5482903 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Shinkolobwe/@-11.045198,26...