Word: atomization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Until recently, the greatest deterrent to amateur bombmaking was the scarcity of the key ingredient. Both weapons and nuclear reactors need fissionable material to sustain a chain reaction -the familiar energy-producing process in which tiny, fast-moving neutrons released by the breakup (fission) of one unstable atom smash into the nuclei of neighboring atoms, causing them to split. The common reactor fuel-which was also used in the bomb that leveled Hiroshima-is a fissionable isotope of uranium called U-235. But U-235 accounts for only about one out of every 140 atoms of uranium in nature...
From several standpoints, nuclear power seems an ideal answer to the continuing energy problem in the U.S. For utilities, it makes economic sense to construct plants that use heat from splitting atoms of uranium to spin turbines that generate electric power. Though the average plant costs 10% to 30% more to build than one that burns coal or oil, operating costs are much lower. Nuclear plants are also relatively kind to the environment. They discharge hot water that can harm aquatic life and change the characteristics of lakes; but they cause no air pollution, no spills at sea, no strip...
SAFEGUARDS. One of the byproducts of nuclear plants is plutonium, the critical ingredient in nuclear weapons. Several critics led by Theodore Taylor, a onetime atom-bomb designer for the AEC, fear that terrorists may steal the material. An amount the size of a softball, Taylor says, could be used to make a bomb that would be small enough to be carried in a car and powerful enough to kill tens of thousands of people. The AEC has tightened existing security restrictions for the transportation and handling of plutonium-indicating in the process that previous safeguards were less than adequate...
...oratories in cities round the world, psychologists, biologists, physicists and chemists, recognizing that what goes on inside the brain cannot be divorced from what goes on outside, in increasing numbers are poking, prodding and analyzing the organ in an attempt to unlock its secrets. Man has split the atom, cracked the genetic code and, in a Promethean step unimaginable less than a quarter-century ago, leaped from his own terrestrial home to the moon. But he has yet to solve the mysteries of memory, learning and consciousness or managed to understand himself...
PRESIDENT NIXON, in his speech last Wednesday night, called research and development the long-term answer to the energy crisis. Just as U.S. technology successfully developed the atom bomb and Apollo 11, it will develop an alternative source of energy, he maintained. The problem and the long term answer, however, do not lie in any particular energy source but in the mentality of the American people...