Word: atomical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ATOM BE A WORKER, NOT A SOLDIER is spelled out in foot-high Cyrillic letters on a wall just inside the main gate of the huge nuclear power complex at Novovoronezh. The slogan seems at first to be no different from the exhortations that decorate buildings throughout the U.S.S.R. Unlike many of the others, however, the slogan at Novovoronezh, some 300 miles south of Moscow, reflects as much realism as rhetoric. The Soviet Union is by no means ready to beat all of its nuclear swords into plowshares. But it is moving vigorously to put the atom to work...
...supplies of fossil fuels, are catching up. They are not only expanding their use of established nuclear technologies and plants but, with a speed sure to cause concern on the western side of the Iron Curtain, they are moving into new-and not wholly proven-ways of harnessing the atom...
Back in the benign 1950s, Americans looked on the atom as a friend, a cheerful Reddy Kilowatt that would provide cheap, abundant electricity to run their factories, power their TV sets and even chill the beer they drank while watching them. Today much of this enthusiasm has not only evaporated but turned into antipathy. Antinuclear activists have slowed construction of power plants from Seabrook, N.H., to Diablo Canyon, Calif. Angry people in Texas, New Mexico and Washington have packed public meetings to protest government plans to use their areas for nuclear-waste disposal and to demand the removal of wastes...
Nature could hardly have created anything that seems more innocuous. An invisible and odorless gas, carbon dioxide is a simple molecular linkup of just a single atom of carbon and two atoms of oxygen (CO2). It constitutes a mere fraction of the atmosphere (.03% vs. about 78% for nitrogen and 20% for oxygen) but becomes dangerous to man and other air-breathing creatures when it accumulates in concentrations higher than 10% as, say, at the bottom of deep wells or mine shafts...
...weeks such exploding stars may shine as brightly as all the galaxy's billions of stars combined. Zwicky and Baade felt sure that the force of such a gravitational collapse and explosion could not only spray material far off into the heavens, but also actually crush the very atoms in the core of a star. Orbiting electrons would be pounded right into the atom's nucleus and wedded with its protons. The result of this celestial alchemy, they said, would be a clump of solidly packed neutrons...