Thread by @DavidCranmerUn1

The Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG) was founded in 1911 in order to promote the natural sciences in Germany, by founding and maintaining research institutions formally independent from the state and its administrations. The institutions were to be under the guidance of

prominent directors, which included luminaries such as Walther Bothe, Peter Debye, Albert Einstein, Fritz Haber and Otto Hahn; a board of trustees also provided guidance.
Funding was ultimately obtained from sources internal and external to Germany. Internally, money was raised

from individuals, industry and the government, as well as through the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association of German Science).
External to Germany, the Rockefeller Foundation granted students worldwide one-year study stipends, for whichever institute

they chose, some studied in Germany The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and its research facilities were involved in weapons research, experimentation and production in both the First World War and the Second World War. During the World War I, the group, and in particular Fritz Haber,

was responsible for introducing the use of poison gas as a weapon.

The institute was opened in 1930 as the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Medical Research, and was re-founded as a Max Planck Institute in 1948.

The Max Planck Society has a world-leading reputation as a science and technology research organization. In 2006, the Times Higher Education Supplement rankings[8] of non-university research institutions (based on international peer review by academics) placed the Max Planck

Society as No.1 in the world for science research, and No.3 in technology research (behind AT&T Corporation and the Argonne National Laboratory in the United States). Meanwhile, the laboratory was also helping to design the reactor for the world's first nuclear-powered

submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus, which steamed for more than 513,550 nautical miles (951,090 km). The next nuclear reactor model was Experimental Boiling Water Reactor, the forerunner of many modern nuclear plants, and Experimental Breeder Reactor II (EBR-II), which was sodium-

cooled, and included a fuel recycling facility. EBR-II was later modified to test other reactor designs, including a fast-neutron reactor and, in 1982, the Integral Fast Reactor concept—a revolutionary design that reprocessed its own fuel, reduced its atomic waste and withstood

safety tests of the same failures that triggered the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island disasters. With both the United States and Russia reaching an agreement in 2001 to render a joint 34 tons of weapons grade plutonium, into reactor grade plutonium alongside reaching the

spent fuel standard, that is mixed with the other more highly radioactive products within spent fuel.[9]
US president Barack Obama canceled construction of the agreement-supporting US MOX fuel fabrication facility in 2016, citing cost overruns and for financial reasons proposing

instead that for the US share of plutonium, it be diluted with non-radioactive material and disposed in the underground WIPP facility.[9][10] However, the dilution could be reversed, and the material reconverted into weapons-grade plutonium.[9]
On October 3, 2016, Russian

president Vladimir Putin ordered the agreement to be suspended because the US did not meet its obligations.[11]
In January 2020 the reactor started commercial operation with the first batch of MOX reprocessed uranium-plutonium fuel.[