How the Columbia River created the US Air Force and the Atomic Bomb?

excerpts from Cadillac Desert:

• In the nineteenth century, aluminum had a street value close to gold's - a function of the amount of energy needed to produce it and the type of energy required.
• It takes twelve times as much energy to produce raw aluminum as it does to make iron, and since the process is electrolytic, it has to be done with electricity.
• After the First World War, aluminum became cheaper, though still not common. The raw material, the production flow, the manufacturing patent, and the end uses were pretty much controlled by the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), which was to vertical integration what William Randolph Hearst was to yellow journalism.
• Hearst, at least, had competition; Alcoa didn't - except from Adolf Hitler, who made Germany the world leader in aluminum production soon after seizing power , for reasons the Allies did not immediately discern.
• No one knows exactly how many planes and ships were manufactured with Bonneville and Grand Coulee electricity, but it is safe to say that the war would have been seriously prolonged at the least without the dams.
• Germany's military buildup during the 1930s gave it a huge start on Britain and France.
• When Hitler invaded Poland and war broke out in Europe, the United States was, militarily speaking, of no consequence; we had fewer soldiers than Henry Ford had auto workers, and not enough modern M-1 Garand rifles to equip a single regiment.
• By 1942, however, we possessed something no other country did: a huge surplus of hydroelectric power. By June of that year, 92 percent of the 900,000 kilowatts of power available from Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams - an almost incomprehensible amount at the time - was going to war production, most of it to building planes.
• One writer, Albert Williams, estimates that "more than half the planes in the American Air Forces was built with Coulee power alone."
• After France capitulated, England was left hanging by a thread. It was rescued by a European sky suddenly full of American planes.
• By the middle of the war, almost half of the aluminum production in the country was located in the Northwest - nearly all of it going to the war effort.
• American planes were being downed almost as fast as they could be produced. German planes, however, were being downed faster than they could be produced. The Nazis had neither the raw materials nor the electricity to produce what they needed fast enough.
• In late 1940, when Grand Coulee Dam was being completed, people had been saying that its power would go begging until the 21st century. Twenty-two months later, all of its available power was being used and the defense industries were screaming for more.
• By the end of the war, at Grand Coulee, we were generating 2,138,000 kilowatts of electricity. We were the single biggest source of electricity in the world. The Germans and the Japanese didn't have anything nearly that big. Imagine what it would have been like without Grand Coulee, Hoover, Shasta, and Bonneville. At the time, they were ranked first, second, third and fourth in the world.
• Although few of the people who lived there knew it at the time, the strange squat structures going up in 1943 at the Hanford Reservation, an ultrasecret military installation along the Columbia River near Richland, Washington, were intimately connected to the Manhattan Project.
• The key material was plutonium-239, an element virtually unknown in nature which has just the right fissile characteristics for an atomic bomb.
• The problem with plutonium - aside from its being fiendishly toxic - is that its production is energy consumptive in the extreme.
• The amount of electricity used by the eight plutonium-production reactors at Hanford is still classified information, but a good guess is fifteen or twenty megawatts each - perhaps 160 megawatts in all. Nowhere else in a country involved in a gigantic war effort could one have found that kind of power to spare.
• In the end, the Axis powers were no match for two things: the Russian winters, and an American hydroelectric capacity that could turn out sixty thousand aircraft in four years. We didn't so much outmaneuver, outman, or outfight the Axis as simply outproduce it.

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