> Before there was any bomb there was the Chicago Pile-1 in the middle of Chicago in a space under the stands at Stagg Field originally built as a rackets court

Groves's book ("Now It Can Be Told") mentions the people that worked with the graphite bricks, that it got into their skin, and even after an after-work shower, they'd still ooze graphite for hours.

Firstly I wonder what their cover story for their spouses was.

Secondly it's clear that they should've had an on-site sauna. Get some deep cleaning going. That would've flushed the graphite gunk out of their hides.

When the USSR was building the bomb, the director of the graphite manufacturing company unofficially asked Kurchatov (the lead scientist of the Soviet nuclear project) to bring him a handful of diamonds.

He assumed that graphite of such high purity can be useful only for this purpose during the wartime.