Word: aec
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...AEC last week announced that it would license the Navy's Military Sea Transportation Service to dump waste material-imbedded in concrete and steel containers-at selected points in both the Pacific and the Atlantic. The oceans are used only for low-energy leftovers-radioactive rubber gloves, mops, rags, discarded lab equipment-but over the years an impressive amount of stuff has been dumped. MSTS joins the Coast Guard, other Navy units and seven private firms in the atomic garbage business; the others have already dumped some 30,000 steel and concrete packages into the Atlantic...
...material remains sealed off in the containers, but some leaks out, might yet show up in seafood. Oceanographers and marine biologists are studying the effects wrought on the radioactive graveyards by such phenomena as bottom currents, movement of bottom sediment and the upwelling of bottom waters. AEC is also concerned about such future needs as a program of international coordination (Britain now pumps its low-energy atomic garbage through a pipe into the Irish Sea) and the radioactivity that will remain in the oceans in the wake of nuclear-powered ships...
...from nuclear reactors at Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Richland, Wash, and other places is much too hot for sea disposal. Instead, the U.S. has spent $120 million to build vast, concrete-encased underground steel tanks, which hold a total of 65 million lethal gallons. The largest concentration is at AEC's Hanford Works at Richland, where tanks hold 80% of the high-energy waste in the U.S. It will remain dangerous at least until the year...
...effort to develop low-cost nuclear power, the Atomic Energy Commission has long experimented at such places as Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, with new liquid reactor fuels-a low-melting alloy of U-233 and bismuth, a solution of uranyl sulfate, and others. But AEC soon discovered that the program was leading only to prohibitively expensive means of obtaining competitive electrical energy, and last week it announced a shift in emphasis: funds for the Brookhaven liquid-fuel project and similar ones elsewhere have been largely diverted to AEC's Oak Ridge laboratory for development of a thermal...
Thorium, on the AEC's back burner for at least five years, is more abundant in the earth's crust than uranium, but usable concentrations are limited. It occurs in monazite sand deposits throughout the world, notably in Brazil, India, South Africa, Ceylon, Madagascar, Indonesia, Malaya and Russia's Ilmen Mountains. In the U.S. it is present in the sand of East Coast beaches, is also found in Idaho and Wyoming...