Tazjet

This is the reality check which matters. The true facts about centrifuge efficiency. US enrichment methods today are considered the most obsolete. Centrifuges provide 54% of the world's Uranium enrichment today whilst gaseous diffusion provides only 33% and almost exclusively in the US, The balance is either Caultron or Laser enrichment. The specific energy consumption rate for Gaseous Diffusion is 2300-3000 kWh/SWU for, versus 100-300 kWh/SWU for a gas centrifuge. SWU stands for Separative Work Unit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium#Separative_work_unit_.28SWU.29 http://www.wise-uranium.org/nfceuh.html The number of stages required to produce LEU is about 30 times larger in the diffusion plant than in the centrifuge plant. When Iraq was still attempting to enrich Uranium from 1982-1989 they attempted several enrichment methods including gaseous diffusion and Caultrons, but preferred the gaseous centrifuge. Also if there was no nuclear testing at Rugen or Ohrdruf please explain the following? Hitler’s own claims about testing nuclear weapons: In August 1944 Hitler Ribbentrop and Keitel met with Romanian Marshal Antonescu. Hitler told Antonescu of Germany’s atomic bomb. He described Germany’s latest work on “new explosives, whose development was already advanced to the experimental stage,” Hitler confided his view that the jump from modern explosives to this one was the biggest since gunpowder. Antonescu later quoted Hitler in his diary saying: “These weapons, for example, have such colossal force that all human life is destroyed within three, or four kilometres of its point of impact.”

Not true at all. South Africa used the German Harteck process to build it's nuclear weapons. Pakistan used the German Harteck process to build it's nuclear weapons. Iran is using the German Harteck process to build it's nuclear weapons. If it's so harmless then i guess we shouldn't be worrying about Iranian nukes then should we? Actually gaseous diffusion is much slower than centrifuge technology but by the end of the war so much money had been sunk into that method that USA could not afford to embark on new technology.

Dr Wilhelm Groth at Kiel University whilst working with Dr Erich Bagge who built the first Uraniumhexaflouride Isotope centrifuge calculated that the BaMag Meguin built prototype would enrich 2 kilograms of UF6 at a rate of 7% per day. Anscholtz & Co built the Mark III-B model in the Hellage factory at Freiberg until it's destruction by Allied bombers on 27 November 1944. There were intervening Mark I and Mark II ultracentrifuges built even earlier in 1943. A contract of 600,000 Reichsmarks was let in April 1944 for the building of Mark III-B models costing between 12,000 to 15,000 RM each. In other words at least 40 Mark III-B machines were funded.

Speer quite truthfully denied knowledge of the Ohrdruf explosion at Nuremberg because by 1945 he was totally uninvolved with the Nazi nuclear project. Albert Speer, in his book *Spandau, The Secret Diaries,* brags that it was he who ordered Werner Heisenberg to stop building an atomic bomb and concentrate on a "uranium motor" for aircraft. Himmler and others appreciated by late 1943 that Speer was blocking the A-bomb and manouvered Speer out of the picture. Himmler's adjutant Wernher Grothmann made a statement after the war that Lt Gen Dr Hans Kammler had headed a co-ordinating bureau for SS nuclear projects since 1943. From 22 July 1944 following the Wolfz Chancllery Bomb plot on 20 July, Himmler removed Speer from the nuclear project and appointed Kammler in charge. Emphasis shifted from Heisenberg and von Weisacker who opposed the bomb and wanted to take the long route of building a reactor to obtain plutonium, to Dr Kurt diebner of the Heereswaffenamt who wanted to take the direct route of enriching Uranium for a Uranium A-bomb. Diebner's laboratory at Stadtilm, near Arnstadt, was only a few kilometres east of the Ohrdruf bomb test site. It's also worth noting that by October 1944 harteck had established a uranium enrichment plant with between ten and forty Mark III-B ultracentrifuges at kandern. Gerlach the Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Science wrote to Goering's private secretary gonnert in October 1944 advising Goering that progress enriching uranium for the atomic weapon was well in hand.