Graphite?

This is coolbert:

Here from an exchange of e-mail posts with Colonel Craig, USMC, regarding the Red Gate Woods forest preserve and the nuclear piles [reactors] CP-2 and CP-3:

"When I was a Scout we went to this area in around 1960. On one of our hikes we came to a very large Metal building filled with an odd black material. We climbed all over it. It was not exactly dirt."

"Hope they did not leave any bad stuff out there. We were not glowing when we were done."

Probably that "odd black material" was high quality graphite as used in CP-2. 

Used as the moderator for the fissionable reaction. [CP-3 was water moderated nuclear reactor.] CP-2 was actually the disassembled and then reassembled CP-1 as had been put together originally at the University of Chicago. The area of the Red Gate Woods AT THE TIME was remote from Chicago, and surrounded by farmland. By the mid-1990's that entire forest preserve area and immediate environs was surrounded by suburbia.

It would be interesting to know if indeed that graphite had an origin in the deposits as found on the island of Madagascar. High-grade graphite with the essential purity and in the quantities as needed for CP-2 again, at that time, FOUND ONLY ON THE ISLAND OF MADAGASCAR.

That invasion and conquest of the Vichy held island making available, inadvertently or not, those deposits of graphite absolutely essential to the development of the atomic bomb. Graphite as obtained and available to the German NOT of the necessary purity or found in the right quantities, the German A-bomb project stymied and thwarted- - no further progress possible unless an alternative reactor moderator found. [that is where heavy water and  Telemark comes into play!]

Perhaps a devoted reader to the blog has the answer to these questions? 1. That graphite as used in CP-2 indeed have an origin in Madagascar? 2. The decision to invade Madagascar was in part based upon the utmost necessity to obtain those graphite deposits as found on the island? Answers anyone?

coolbert.