Word: aec
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Monstrous Assembly. Several years ago Drs. Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan Jr., physicists of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, armed themselves with AEC money and went hunting neutrinos. Their first attempts, with a monstrous assembly of special apparatus, were inconclusive (TIME, May 10, 1954). They thought they detected neutrinos streaming out of the AEC's great reactors at Hanford, Wash., but they were not sure. So they returned to Los Alamos and constructed an even more monstrous apparatus...
Best hunting ground for neutrinos is near nuclear reactors, from which, by the Fermi-Pauli theory, they stream in vast numbers. So Reines and Cowan took their apparatus to the AEC's Savannah River plant. They set it up in an underground room where it was sheltered from distracting cosmic rays but exposed to a flood of neutrinos from one of the great plutonium-producing reactors...
...second) had hit a proton (out of billions along its path) and turned it into a positron and a neutron. After watching this happen for a total of 1,371 hours and taking elaborate precautions to eliminate false signals, Reines and Cowan announced that they had really detected neutrinos. AEC Commissioner Willard F. Libby congratulated them on their "magnificent accomplishment." Now nuclear physics can use neutrinos without an uneasy conscience. Further neutrino experiments, Libby hinted, may reveal deep secrets about the structure of matter. They may tell what happened to matter that turned into neutrinos in the hearts of stars...
...Defense, ex-president (1950-55) of the University of North Carolina, onetime (1949-50) Secretary of the Army and special assistant to Harry Truman on foreign aid (the "Gray Report"), first director of the U.S. Government's Psychological Strategy Board, head of the special security board of the AEC that barred Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer from access to the nation's top atom secrets, publisher; and Mrs. Nancy Maguire Beebe, 31; both for the second time; in Washington...
While U.S. progress might be faster, the faults are not private industry's. It took 13 months from the time Consolidated Edison started negotiations with AEC to build a privately financed reactor before the AEC came through with the construction permit. Today, most private companies are still waiting on such essential Government actions as: 1) Government reinsurance to protect private companies against catastrophic damages from a reactor accident, 2) amendment of the Public Utility Holding Company Act to permit individual companies to club together to raise the huge sums necessary to build atomic reactors, 3) a Treasury ruling that...