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Message:: [QUOTE="Conder101, post: 2578763, member: 66"]The silver (50 million oz) was used for the windings of electromagnets and bus bars in the centrifuges used to separate U-235 from U-238.  After the war it was eventually replaced with copper and almost all of it was returned to the Mint. (Ft Knox stored gold and may have stored silver as well.  It did store other stratigic and historical artifacts as well including the original Declaration of Independence.  All of the gold in Fort Knox was controlled by the Mint as well.). In "Surely You're joking Mr Fynnman" Professor Richard Fynnman wrote that the door stop to the doorstop to the room as Los Alamos when the first plutonium core for the bomb was kept was a 10 inch hemisphere of gold.  They had experimented with gold as a possible reflector for neutrons but it didn't work out and they took the scrap and melted it down to make the doorstop. The recycling of the shell casings also solved a major headache for the military.  What to do with all those shell casing?  No one wanted them because of the difficulty recycling brass, plus the possibility of live rounds being mixed in with the casings.  Their only option seemed to be to bury them, which would not have gone over well with the public being asked to cut back on everything and the scrap drives etc.  When the Mint agreed to take them the military agreed to sort them to make sure there were no live rounds included.[/QUOTE]