Word: aec
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Last week the AEC sought to put the old report to rest forever by issuing WASH-1400. This new study, a 3,300-page, 14-volume document that cost $3 million and took 60 specialists two years to research and write, is called An Assessment of Accident Risks in U.S. Commercial Nuclear Power Plants. Like its predecessor, its argument is statistical. The probability of any conventional water-cooled reactor's having an accident in any given year that might kill 1,000 people, the researchers reckon, is about the same as that of a meteor's striking...
...result of work by Taylor and others, a recent Atomic Energy Com mission study urges that a new federal nuclear protection and transportation service be set up. It is hard to read the book without hoping that the AEC and private manufacturers will indeed tight en what seems to be unbelievably sloppy security. Locations and (in some cases) floor plans of atomic installations can be had from the U.S. Government Printing Office. So, according to Tay lor, can enough declassified hints on bomb making to smooth the way for any halfway-intelligent home hobbyist...
...expected, the claim caused widespread excitement. It promised that fusion plants might some day supply mankind with practically unlimited energy. Indeed, an AEC spokesman called the feat "a small but significant initial step." But at week's end doubt was growing among some nuclear scientists that the laboratory had done anything more than Soviet and U.S. researchers had previously announced. In fact, it seemed quite possible that true thermonuclear fusion had not really occurred at all during the Ann Arbor experiments...
...actual manufacture of the bomb, the basic information can be gleaned from any number of public documents, some of them published by the AEC. Essentially, all that is needed to achieve a blast is to bring together a sufficient amount of properly shaped fissionable material fast enough to initiate a massive chain reaction. To do that, the Hiroshima bomb used the so-called gunbarrel technique: both ends of a heavy metal pipe were stuffed with U-235 and the charge at one end was used as a projectile. To detonate the bomb, the U-235 projectile was hurled by conventional...
...keep such potentially murderous materials out of the wrong hands, the AEC study recommends the establishment of a federal nuclear protection and transportation service, stronger links between the AEC and such intelligence-gathering agencies as the CIA and FBI, and tougher testing of the security measures taken by such "nuclear licensees" as fabricators, processors and storage depots. These measures could make it more difficult for do-it-yourself bombers. But perhaps no system is proof against Murphy's Law, which holds that if anything can possibly go wrong, it will. Back in the early 1950s, a routine inventory revealed...