Word: aec
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...bowels of large atom smashers. They live for only a fraction of a second, but are able to pass unscathed through heavy barriers or shields. Thus, unless carefully controlled, they often show up where they are not wanted, and can play havoc with experiments. Now a scientist at the AEC's Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago plans to put the troublesome particles to work. In an effort to take some of the burden off the increasingly crowded air waves, Theoretical Physicist Richard C. Arnold proposes using beams of muons as the core of a radical new communications technology that...
Skeptics, including many distinguished scientists, remain unconvinced that every precaution has been taken. During a reactor's operation, the worst possible contingency is the uncontrolled melting of its nuclear core. To preclude such an occurrence, which the AEC calls "the maximum credible accident," the core is continually bathed in cooling water; the AEC even requires an emergency set of pipes and valves to continue supplying the water if one set is severed. Unfortunately, simulated tests by the AEC itself have shown that the reserve pipes, the "emergency core cooling system" (ECCS), may also fail. What would happen...
Kendall and other critical scientists are quick to add that there is very little chance of such a catastrophe actually happening, but even the bare possibility makes them oppose going ahead with the nuclear program until the cooling problem is totally solved. Conceding the point, the AEC is holding open hearings on nuclear safety in Bethesda, Md. In the meantime, it has allowed only one new nuclear plant to go into operation in the past 17 months...
...seems to be a miraculous machine indeed. It produces slightly more fuel than it consumes, thus extending fuel supplies for centuries.* It wastes less heat energy than any other kind of power plant available today, and it seems technically feasible (though the biggest prototype partially melted in 1966). The AEC aims to have a $500 million demonstration plant operating by 1980, probably in the Tennessee Valley Authority's network. Says AEC Chairman James Schlesinger, who took over the agency a year ago: "If we don't have breeder technology in the 1990s, the regrets could be very great...
...cooling medium. Others concern the fuel, plutonium, the basic ingredient of the hydrogen bomb and one of the deadliest substances known. Finally, the critics wonder how to get rid of radioactive wastes from any nuclear reactor, some of which remain lethal for 500,000 years. At present, the AEC plans to store them in large concrete containers at an as yet unspecified location. Then they must be watched (and watched). "We are committing future generations," reported a British commission last month, "to a problem that we do not know how to handle...