I was just reading about the construction of the first atomic weapons at trinity when I came across another one of those quotes from the scientists saying that they did not believe that there was enough uranium in the world to build more than a handful of bombs. I know that Germany abandoned their project because of the same predictions.
Obviously they were wrong. There are many thousand nuclear weapons in the world and (I am guessing) hundreds of nuclear power plants. So how did we overcome the problem of a lack of uranium and other heavy elements? Where were the scientists wrong?
It’s been argued that the biggest success of the Manhattan Program was the creation of the gaseous diffusion industrial process at Oak Ridge that made the refinement of large amounts of uranium from uranium hexafluoride feasible.
Another point I remember from reading Rhodes’ book is that it was very unclear, initially, what the critical mass of a uranium bomb actually was. Obviously if you think you’d need several tons of uranium to make a bomb, then you’ll conclude that you can’t make as many bombs out of the uranium you have.
Part of the problem was finding sources of Uranium ore. It’s not that it is particularly rare, but there wasn’t a reason to search for it. One of the stereotypical figures from the 1940s and 1950s in the desert southwest area of the USA was the mineral prospector searching for Uranium ore deposits with a geiger counter. A decade earlier, he would have probably been looking for copper, silver and gold.