Like I said, the Manhattan Project was 2 years inside which an entire unknown property was developed into the most powerful and concentrated energy source man has harnessed.
It wasn't two years. Roosevelt authorized research into the feasibility of constructing a bomb on October 9, 1941.
But theoretical development of the bomb had been ongoing for years prior to that date, and it certainly wasn't an unknown, either. In September 1933, physicist Leo Szilard had the idea that if the atom of a chemical element could be coaxed into shedding two or more electrons by being struck with one electron it could be used to create electrical power on an industrial scale and build an extremely powerful bomb.
Szilard applied for and was granted a British patent for the concept of an atomic bomb in 1934.
On July 4, 1934 Leo Szilard filed a patent application for the atomic bomb. In his application, Szilard described not only the basic concept of using neutron induced chain reactions to create explosions, but also the concept of the critical mass. The patent was awarded to him, making Leo Szilard the legally recognized inventor of the atomic bomb.
http://www.cccoe.k12.ca.us/abomb/popups/patent.htm
In December 1938, physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch were the first to describe the mechanism which resulted in the splitting of the atom and coined the term "nuclear fission".
Shortly after that it became common knowledge to physicists worldwide (including those in Germany, Japan, Italy, Great Britain, and the USSR) that Uranium-235 could be used to make a bomb thousands of times more powerful than any such weapon currently in use.
The Manhattan Project's biggest challenge was finding a way to physically separate the uranium-235 isotope from the element uranium. Naturally occurring uranium is 99.27 percent uranium-238, with uranium-235, the isotope most suited to producing energy, making up about 0.72 percent.
By the end of 1938 the theory of an atomic bomb was well known among physicists and its development was thus inevitable. By contrast, the aluminum ion battery, and for that matter chemical battery technology advancements as a whole, are limited by constraints on the atomic level. This almost certainly precludes the development of a chemical battery which has ten times the recharge capacity of known battery electrolytes and the ability to recharge a 100 kW battery plant in just minutes.
For energy storage to reach those goals, a paradigm of unknown certainty must be discovered. This is different from the development of the nuclear bomb. From the moment in 1905 that Einstein developed his theory of Special Relativity and postulated that energy and mass are equivalent and transmutable (E = mc2), the outcome that realized atomic fission was preordained. No such path currently exists for the miracle battery.
