Word: aec
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Thus emboldened, the council three weeks ago passed its first "ordinance," setting up the office of dogcatcher, requiring licenses for Richland dogs and specifying eight-foot leashes in public places. Nothing happened; the council was told that AEC lawyers would have to think it over. Last week, the Richland city council tried again. Angry over the way the Government was issuing rules about how householders should leave their garbage, the council decided to draft its ordinance No. 2, expressing its own ideas for garbage disposal in the model city. This time it was mad, and so were the townspeople...
...AEC's new breeders, or converters, will lessen the waste, presumably by causing more neutrons to be absorbed byU-238. If the amount of plutonium or other nuclear fuel thus produced is larger than the U-235 consumed, the pile could continue in operation for a very long time. First the original U-235 would be consumed, yielding energy and plutonium made out of 11-238. Then some of the plutonium would fission, yielding energy and creating more atomic fuel. Theoretically, the process might continue until all the 11-238 is consumed. Natural uranium could yield something like...
...Ashes. The AEC does not claim immediate 100% efficiency. The accumulation of radioactive fission products as impurities in the uranium, for instance, will certainly cause trouble long before the action is complete. But the contaminated uranium could be purified and "recycled." The AEC did not say so, but there is a possibility that when the breeding process has been refined, the uranium can be run through the reactor again & again until essentially all of it has been turned into energy. The world might thus have a practically inexhaustible source of nuclear fuel...
Although the AEC emphasized the peaceful aspects of its new process, the military aspects are important too. Fissionable material, however obtained, can be burned in a peaceful reactor or detonated in a bomb. If the new converter works as well as expected, it will help the U.S. make more bombs out of less uranium...
...taken big strides (see SCIENCE). But with Russian possession of the bomb, new readjustments were bound to come. It was probably time for congressional re-evaluation of the Atomic Energy (McMahon) Act of 1946, for redefining problems of secrecy and military security, for clarifying the checks & balances on AEC-the "advisory" scientists, the military liaison officers, the joint congressional "watchdog" committee itself. Any changes that had to be made would come more smoothly under a less controversial AEC chairman...