Word: aec
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Even before the Bravo explosion, the AEC had begun to check worldwide radioactivity and is still at it. In the gardens of U.S. employees abroad, pans exposed to the sky collect rain and dust. Their catch is sent periodically to the AEC along with foreign cheese and other, foodstuffs. Another AEC importation: foreign human cadavers for radioanalysis...
...this flow of information is based the official AEC position, recently expressed by Scientist-Commissioner Willard F. Libby. In general. Chemist Libby's view is calm. As a scientist, he knows that fission products from megaton* explosions rise into the stratosphere and circulate round the earth for years. Most threatening of them is strontium 90, whose long half-life (28 years) keeps it potent during its stratospheric circling, and whose habit of lodging for keeps in human bone makes it a probable cause of leukemia and bone cancer...
...AEC scientists agree with Dr. Libby. Most vocal is Physicist Ernest O. Lawrence of the University of California, Nobel Prizewinner (1939) and inventor of the cyclotron, who finds it "beyond my comprehension" that any reputable scientist should worry about fallout from weapons tests. He thinks the tests could continue forever without damage...
...caused by radiation. He uses statistics covering Japanese atom-bomb victims and three types of Americans exposed to large amounts of X rays. Strontium 90, he believes, will have the same effect. He figures that if its concentration in U.S. bones ever rises to one-tenth of what the AEC considers the "maximum permissible concentration," leukemia in the U.S. will increase...
FIRST ATOM POWER PLANT in U.S. using natural uranium as fuel, instead of more expensive uranium enriched with U-235, will be built near Tampa by three Florida utilities. Florida Nuclear Power Group is expected to get AEC subsidy for $40 million plant that will have capacity of 136,000 kw. when it is finished...