The German physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote in 1947 that the reactor for the "Nazi bomb" project — which culminated in Germany's B8 nuclear reactor — was almost finished at the end of World War II.
If it had worked, the B8 reactor would have confirmed that a fission chain reaction was possible, marking a key step toward the German development of an atomic bomb. It could have also spurred the development of specialized fission reactors used to create weapons-grade plutonium from uranium. Instead, the atomic bomb was developed first by the United States and was used to force the surrender of Japan in August 1945. (Germany had already surrendered in May 1945.)
"My results argue that Heisenberg was off by roughly a factor of two," said first author Patrick Park, a doctoral student at Princeton University who co-wrote the study while at Columbia University.
My results argue that Heisenberg was off by roughly a factor of two.
"People were dying or starving and so these reactor calculations were not his first priority," while many details of neutron physics were unknown at that time, Park told Live Science in an email. "Given these circumstances, I think he did the best he could."
Heavy water
Heavy water is a form of water that contains the neutron-heavy hydrogen isotope deuterium. Like the mainly-graphite blocks and rods used in many reactors, it can be used to "moderate" or slow down fast neutrons created in a fission reaction so they trigger fission — and more neutrons — in nearby uranium atoms. The Germans also used small amounts of graphite in their reactor, but as a coating to reflect neutrons back into the chamber.
A cube of natural uranium from the German atomic bomb project. (Image credit: John T. Consoli, University of Maryland College Park, MD.)But the study authors determined that a graphite-moderated reactor was unfeasible in wartime Germany because the local supply of coal available to create graphite contained high levels of neutron-absorbing boron, making it useless.
Heavy water makes up a tiny fraction of a percent of ordinary water, and extracting it by electrolysis in the Norwegian factory took extraordinary effort. The factory was producing as much heavy water as it could, but the B8 reactor would have needed more than twice the amount it produced during the entire war, the researchers wrote.
But the researchers determined that the B8 reactor would have needed at least 1,200 cubes to work. Germany, therefore, was not about to develop a reactor for an atomic bomb in 1945. Contrary to Heisenberg's claims, the heavy-water reactor was not nearly ready, and a working graphite reactor was impossible.
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Walker is the author of "Hitler's Atomic Bomb: History, Legend, and the Twin Legacies of Auschwitz and Hiroshima" (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and a noted expert on Germany's wartime nuclear efforts. He agreed that Germany could not have made a graphite reactor during World War II.
"This paper argues that if the Germans had done something they did not do, then this would have failed," he told Live Science in an email. "While this is counterfactual history, it is an interesting engineering analysis."
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