private_messaging comments on Being Half-Rational About Pascal's Wager is Even Worse - Less Wrong
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There's something else. Most nuclei that will fission when irradiated with high energy neutrons (such as the ones from the neutron sources of the time) actually will not sustain chain reaction! That's the distinction between "fissile" and "fissionable". More here .
edit: Curiously enough, U238 can fission with neutrons produced by it's own fission, it just that most neutrons slow down before they fission any nucleus, and U238 can only be fissioned by fast neutrons. Had U235 had a bit shorter half life, or had evolution taken longer to make us, or had Sun formed later in the cloud, or the like, bench-top fission would still have been discovered (using neutrons from radium&lithium and U238) but we wouldn't have bomb anywhere near 1945 . This is quite interesting because of it's potential impact on Fermi's paradox. Nukes could be a lot harder to make.
Most don't, that's true. It only takes one.
There are at least four materials capable of sustaining a fission chain reaction, and any change to nuclear physics that is barely large enough to take those away would replace them with others. We are not even particularly near the boundary of it being possible.
1: When you only know that one fissions to begin with, you can't use that.
2: You need something naturally abundant enough, and (correct me if I am wrong) there's only one, it's U-235, with an outstandingly long half life for a fissile isotope, of 700 millions years, which is still not very long (other stuff doesn't hit even a million years). I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if small adjustments to fundamental constants can change it to 2 and other small changes, 0.
edit: basically. No U-235, no bomb until you can bootstrap some sort of breeder using a particle accelerator, like, after decades and decades and decades of engineering, when all countries know the principle, but its too expensive.
But they made Pu-239 in time for WW2. Did that rely on reactor-grade U-235? Even if they did use reactor-grade U-235 to make it, could they have just stuck it near some other neutron emitter?
Yes, Fermi engineered the nuclear reactor (and very carefully too, with very well thought out safety system for it, just in case there would be a positive feedback of some kind), using natural uranium and graphite. Other neutron emitters would be very very very expensive. edit: e.g. an accelerator would need ridiculous amounts of electrical energy. The lab emitter used radium in combination with lithium, beryllium, or some other light nuclei, which isn't a viable route either.