• Question: How was the atomic bomb made?

    Asked by Alex Roach to Christie, Dan, David, Dawn, Sian on 14 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Christie Waddington

      Christie Waddington answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      The making of the atomic bomb, aka Manhatten Project. was led by the US Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. The main metal they needed was Uranium, but it had to be the special isotope Uranium-235 which is very hard to get hold of! They extracted uranium ore and converted this to uranium metal (for every 500 parts uranium ore, they got 1 part uranium metal!). Out of 99 parts uranium metal, only 1 part is Uranium-235! They had to research extraction methods to separate out Uranium-235, which they did eventually (a Californian called Ernest Lawrence). During World War II, the method was finalised and on July 16, 1945 they tested the atomic bomb. Unfortunately, it worked. Oppenheimer is quoted as saying “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.

    • Photo: Dan Lewis

      Dan Lewis answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      I think Christie answered this perfectly.

    • Photo: David Robertson

      David Robertson answered on 14 Jun 2016:

      Christie has answered very well. You need quite a lot of U235, and you need to squash it together quickly. The U235 was in a hollow sphere (like a deadly football) with a bigger sphere of explosives around it. When the outer explosives went off it squashed the U235 together very quickly and started the atomic explosion.

    • Photo: Sian Thomas

      Sian Thomas answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      Some great answers from the other scientists. This also has relevance for food – generally you want to have as low level of radioactivity in the diet as possible. The Food Standards Agency has a monitoring programme which takes food samples each year and looks at the levels of a range of radioactive materials to see how much people eat.

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