Word: atomize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...emphasis on the second dimension of her theory. Half a century ago she saw institutions destroyed in Japan and Stalinist Russia, and watched idealism self-distract in the country side of Civil War-torn Spain. In the last 15 years--she has seen the Vietnam War. Watergate and the atom bomb trigger the same reactions in the United States, she has with increasing frequency turned to history for answers. Although she still retains her humanistic vision, she has gradually focused more attention on dredging history for clues...
From the very beginning, the U.S. nuclear-power industry has suffered one setback after another. Electricity was produced from the atom for the first time in December 1951 at Experimental Breeder Reactor 1, a station near Arco, Idaho. Typically even for then, the switch was thrown several months behind schedule. Nonetheless the dream of the day was that nuclear-generated electricity was not far off and that when it arrived, it would be "too cheap to meter...
...biggest deterrent to nuclear power, even more so than burdensome regulation and community fears about safety. Buoyant assumptions about industrial growth, in vogue when most nuclear plants were conceived, have not held up. Smokestack industries-autos, steel, chemicals-that were expected to consume more and more electricity from the atom are waning in importance in the American economy as imports grab bigger shares of U.S. markets. Demand for electricity by what was supposed to be an ever more affluent, wasteful society has fallen off sharply. U.S. consumption of electricity declined 2% or so last year after rising at an average...
...m.p.h. at sea level), it would have moved only nine feet before a laser beam arrived from 1,000 miles away. High-velocity beams of charged particles would be harder to create. Unlike the massless photons that make up light beams, charged particles (those parts of the atom that carry an electronic charge; electrons most likely would be used in a missile-killing beam) have weight. But, as in the beams used in atom smashers, they could be "energized" in strong magnetic fields to velocities approaching the speed of light...
...Open Universe, philosopher Karl Popper searches for that crucial ingredient whose absence keeps us from reducing the world's problems to perturbations in an atom's trajectory...