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• GeorgeH commented on Shieldwall: Barbarians! Writing and self-publishing an old school boy's young officer story set in Attila's invasion
  In WW2 they were time, electricity, and to a lesser extent (but significant) capital materials limited. Time prohibited making centrifuges work; that just took a lot more thinking and engineering. The South African vortex method would have been great (and achievable) if anyone had thought of it. Lasers were still far in the future. Calutrons took fewer steps per unit enrichment but had mass flow limitations. Capital effective energy ineffective. Gas Diffusion capital ineffective energy more effective. So they ended up using large Gas Diffusion plants which were then topped off with Calutron processing of mid-enrichment product. (this also is...
• Nojay commented on Shieldwall: Barbarians! Writing and self-publishing an old school boy's young officer story set in Attila's invasion
  The problem is where does a small clandestine facility get the energy to do this kind of separation? The power grid requirements for calutrons are immense and having a couple of 400kV supergrid feeds running into a two-story "muffler repair shop" somewhere remote is going to look funny on the satellite photos. Similarly there are the chemical feedstocks inventory, the waste materials, the staffing requirements (the GD lines at Oak Ridge were manually controlled to start with), janitorial services, food supplies etc. etc. etc. which make an undercover project into something that just can't be hidden. Pretending it is something...
• GeorgeH commented on Shieldwall: Barbarians! Writing and self-publishing an old school boy's young officer story set in Attila's invasion
  Nojay, at this time I am not willing to hypothesize along those lines in public. It could have real world impacts....
• Dirk Bruere commented on Shieldwall: Barbarians! Writing and self-publishing an old school boy's young officer story set in Attila's invasion
  You do it on site at the energy production facilities...
• J Thomas commented on Shieldwall: Barbarians! Writing and self-publishing an old school boy's young officer story set in Attila's invasion
  If I was young enough to be deciding the start of a career trajectory, and if I wanted to head that direction, I think I would look at designing molecular sieves from proteins. Design a structure that will hold one isotope but not another, sequence the gene and clone it, produce lots of it, you might get a cheap or at least low-energy enrichment approach. The hard step is designing the molecular sieve. There are various bacterial transport systems that collect various heavy metals. It might be a shortcut to check whether some of them differentially transport desired isotopes. But...