Manhattan Project — Daily Schedule — Term 5

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Continued from Daily Schedule-Term 4

Week 8 (Mar. 12-18) — Creation and Refinement of Fissile Isotopes

• Preparation for Tuesday, Mar. 13 — Short Presentations: Trey, Experiments on animals and the beginnings of understanding radiation sickness; Brian, Thorium reactors; Mac, Diffusion membranes for clean water from seawater (as a way of learning more about gaseous diffusion) — Finish Chapter 5 (the thermal diffusion program), pp. 223-234
• Tuesday, Mar. 13 — Midterm course evaluations discussion and outcomes — Presentations from Trey and Brian — S-50 (thermal diffusion) discussion — Mean free path problem (Reed Problem 5.7)
• Preparation for Friday, Mar. 16 — Turn in Assignment 7 — Short Presentations: Norah, Ruth Huddleston and what did the Calutron girls and other workers know; Trey, understanding medical ethics considerations for giving radioactive iron to pregnant mothers and radioactive iodine to babies (including dose and expected risk, informed consent, goals/benefits of these diagnostics and experiments, and the subsequent evolution of human subjects guidelines); Mac, Diffusion membranes for clean water from seawater (as a way of learning more about gaseous diffusion, assuming you are still interested in that subject); Mac 2, current status of Iran’s U-235 and Pu-239 enrichment programs; Norah 2, economic sanctions and military threats and attacks on Iran to try to deter their nuclear program, including attacks on the gas centrifuges and the nuclear scientists — Go through Chapter 6 (the Hanford nuclear reactors), to p. 263 — For my (Brian’s) contribution to the discussion of Sections 6.1 to 6.5, I will try to synthesize what we know about Hanford’s reactor operation in terms of fundamental phenomenological facts including nuclear cross-sections for absorption, scattering, and fission, abundances, power generation, and energy per fission
• Friday, Mar. 16 — Turned in Problem Set 7 — [Problem Set 7 Solution](./assignments/Assignment07-Solution.pdf — Two presentations from Mac (diffusion membranes and Iran’s nuclear enrichment program) and presentation from Trey (human subjects testing) — The layout of the Hanford complex near the convergence of the Columbia, the Yakima, and the Snake rivers — The problem of waste heat — The need for power — — The surprising 3,000,000 barn cross-section of Xenon

Week 9 (Mar. 19-25) — Finish Hanford Reactor Complex — Begin Los Alamos

• Preparation for Tuesday, Mar. 20 — Short Presentations: Trey, the current status of spent fuel rod and other nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain; Mac, the current status of groundwater contamination at Hanford — Finish reading Chapter 6 (the Hanford reactors) Sections 6.6 and 6.7, and begin reading Chapter 7 (Los Alamos) through 7.3, p. 286
• Tuesday, Mar. 20 —
• Preparation for Friday, Mar. 23 — Continue reading Chapter 7 through Section 7.7.2, p. 312 — Prepare to discuss or present a solution of Problem 7.4 on p. 376 (which is directly related to the fizzle problem) — Look at my copy of Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and decide if you want to read selections from it (I filed my copy on the library shelves at call number 539.71) — You have hard-copy Los Alamos from Below by Richard Feynman that you can get started on, but I am not imagining that we discuss it until Tuesday, Mar. 27 — Here is soft-copy of The Los Alamos Primer in case you are curious what scientists arriving at the project were given as a starting point
• Friday, Mar. 23 — Approximations for computing annuli volumes — How half-lives for different decay modes combine — Mean free paths — Causes of premature detonation in U-235 (mostly alpha decays and impurities) — Causes of premature detonation in Pu-239 (mostly spontaneous fissions of Pu-240)

Week 10 — Diffusion Theory Results — The Implosion Bomb

• Preparation for Tuesday, Mar. 27 — Continue reading Chapter 7 to the start of Section 7.11 (through p. 326) — Pick a chapter (or two!) from the Richard Rhodes classic (I filed my copy on the library shelves at call number 539.71) — Finish Los Alamos from Below by Richard Feynman
• Tuesday, Mar. 27 — Continue discussion of mean free paths and the formulae for critical mass
• Preparation for Friday, Mar. 30 — Finish Chapter 7 (but not the optional section on other fissile materials)
• Friday, Mar. 30 — Trey takes us further into random walks (only go as far as the blue plot that looks like a downward-opening parabola) — Random walks and transport theory, in a material that is expanding due to the pressure increase of the liberated energy is what the neutrons are doing as they scatter and cause additional fissions — Mac takes us further into nuclear proliferation in South Africa and former Soviet Union states — I would like to watch a several minutes of lecture version by Feynman of Los Alamos from Below (we start with some levity about the stuck valves, and then where he recounts the beginnings of the entire field of computational physics)

Week 11 — Bombing and Aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

• Preparation for Tuesday, Apr. 4 — Continue in Reed through Section 8.3 — Instead of presentations on distinct topics, Trey and Mac will take opposing sides on the same issue: Trey will argue that using atomic bombs on two cities was inhumane and unjustified, because the war in the Pacific was already near an end; Mac will argue that the use of two atomic bombs was in fact decisive and that Truman’s primary duty, both on moral grounds and as Commander in Chief was to swiftly end the war — My understanding of the status of the war in the Pacific tilts me toward the latter position, but the more time that goes by, the more people are lining up on the side that using an atomic bomb on a city under any circumstances is an atrocity, so it is certainly the case that both sides of this issue can be compellingly argued, at least with nearly eighty years of hindsight
• Preparation for Friday, Apr. 7 — Finish Reed Chapter 8 — As Problem Set 8, read and do the three problems at the end of Reed’s CP1 Pile Analysis — Note that Reed did not give the formula for n = (1 + m)/(1/n_fuel+m/n_mod) because for large m it is awfully close to just n_mod — A Problem Set 8 Solution Screenshots

Week 12 — The German Nuclear Program — Postwar Developments (H-Bomb, Nuclear Stockpiles, Arms Limitation Treaties)

• Preparation for Tuesday, Apr. 11 — Read the entirety of Reed Chapter 9 — Presentations: Trey, destruction of German heavy-water facility (Operation Gunnerside); Mac, sinking of the Norwegian ship Hydro; Brian, Germany’s contaminated moderator problem
• Preparation for Friday, Apr. 14 — Problem Set 9 — Problem Set 9 Solution — Study the remainder of Reed (the entirety of Chapter 10)

Week 13 — Contemporary Analyses

• Preparation for Tuesday, Apr. 18 — The Rise and Fall of the South African Bomb by Peter Liberman — Nuclear Stability in South Asia by Sumit Ganguly — Ten Years of Instability in a Nuclear South Asia by S. Paul Kapur
• Preparation for Friday, Apr. 21 — Nuclear Terrorism — Israel and Iran

Week 14 — Contemporary Analyses (Continued)

• Preparation for Tuesday, Apr. 25 — Mutually Assured Desctruction vs. CNE (coercive nuclear escalation) aka escalation dominance
• Tuesday, Apr. 25 — Stability-Instability Paradox discussion — Expansionism and defense of spheres of influence discussion
• Preparation for Friday, Apr. 28 — Mutually Assured Destruction vs. CNE (continued) — Taiwan as a possible flashpoint — Problem Set 10 — Problem Set 10 Solution
• Friday, Apr. 28 — Final paper discussion prior to submission — Discussion of Stability-Instability Paradox (continued) — Taiwan as a possible flashpoint