Mysterious uranium cubes could be Nazi experiments

A research team based at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, USA is working to certify that mysterious uranium cubes in US laboratories were once part of German efforts. Nazi to build a successful nuclear program. Using nuclear forensics, the team could get ever closer to determining the provenance of the radioactive cubes; As of yet, no one really knows how most of these cubes got to where they are today.

The team’s research was presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society. From 1939 to 1945, the Nazis had their own nuclear program. There were two Nazi research groups, one led by Werner Heisenberg and another led by Kurt Diebner, who designed and built nuclear reactors in the hope of making an atomic bomb. After the war, many cubes were shipped to the United States, where they were released to universities and on private property, through formal and informal channels.

Cubes usually don’t have a solid provenance history, meaning people didn’t keep track of every hand they crossed and when. The current team suspects that there were once between 1,000 and 1,200 cubes in Nazi reactors, but today we know about 12 of them. Now the team wants to uncover the origin of a cube in the Washington State, as well as a few others.

“We don’t know for sure if the cubes are from the German program, so we want to determine that first. Then we want to compare the different cubes to see if we can categorize them based on the particular research group that created them, ”Jon Schwantes, principal investigator of the project, said at a press conference. Release from the American Chemical Society.

The work of German scientists focused on the Nuclear fision, the process by which a heavy nucleus is destabilized by bombardment of neutrons, forcing the nucleus to decompose with the release of energy. Heisenberg’s group hoped they could trick a heap of uranium soaked in heavy water to create plutonium for use in an atomic bomb. The Nazi reactor cubes, which measured about 2 inches on each side, were suspended from cables in a three-dimensional structure underwater. Fortunately, the conception failed.

And then their time was up. In 1945 the fBritish and American forces confiscated some of the uranium cubes involved in the German experiments and sent more than 600 to the United States. Since then, some of the uranium has disappeared. Others, like the one in Washington, have dubious provenance. The one from the University of Maryland came up with an intriguing note, like reported in 2019 the collaborators of the current project. The note simply said: “Taken from the reactor Hitler tried to build.” Gift of Ninninger ”. Nininger (his name is misspelled on the note) was an interim manager of a Manhattan Project site in Murray Hill, Manhattan, and he gave a cube he probably acquired at work to a friend, who has it. given to another friend, who gave it to current project collaborator Timothy Koeth for his birthday.

The research team uses radiochronometry, which measures radioactive material and the material in which it decomposes, to determine the age of 3 cubes. As uranium cubes decompose since they were melted, they now contain amounts of thorium and protactinium.

Brittany Robertson, a chemist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and research collaborator, applies a radiochronometric method that will be able to identify each element in a cube and its relative concentration, which can tell researchers when the cube was made. On top of that, the impurities in the cube could leave traces of other rare earth elements, which can indicate where the original uranium was mined.

“Our first goal will just be to confirm the pedigree of the 3 cubes we are measuring, where the expected age of this material is expected to be from the early to mid-1940s,” Schwantes said. Gizmodo in an email. “If our dating method is extremely precise, it might also be possible to determine whether these cubes came from the Heisenberg program or the Diebner program, since their manufacturing dates were slightly different (about 1 year).

Radiochronometry operates on short time frames, allowing researchers to understand what the cubes looked like in the 1940s. They are unsure whether any of the cubes belonged to Heisenberg’s or Diebner’s lab (or none, although that seems unlikely) . While tracing the origin of the cube to their laboratory is an “outsized goal,” Schwantes said, the team should at least be able to confirm that the cubes are of Nazi origin, which they assume is true. but did not have the means to do so. so far check it out.