Word: bhabhas
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...talk that most stirred the conference's first week was a bold prophecy by India's Physicist Homi J. Bhabha, 45, conference president. Bound by none of the security regulations that so often gag U.S. experts, Bhabha predicted that by 1975 man will have tamed the H-bomb's fusion reaction and converted its tremendous energy (more than 1,000 times that of the Abomb) to useful electric power...
...mined economically by cheap hand labor. Probably more important are India's thorium deposits, the richest in the world. Thorium cannot be used directly as nuclear fuel. It must be turned into uranium 233 in a reactor, just as uranium 238 is turned into plutonium. Dr. Bhabha thinks that this conversion may be standard practice a few years from now. Uranium 233 derived from thorium is in many important respects the most desirable of all the nuclear fuels...
...plutonium could be made into atom bombs, but Dr. Bhabha is sure that India will never make a bomb. He wants to use all the plutonium in breeder reactors to turn India's thorium into ever-growing amounts of nuclear fuel...
This plan is no pipe dream, Dr. Bhabha insists. India is already producing most of the instruments and electronic components that are needed in nuclear energy development. The country has a rapidly growing body of scientists and technicians. Already, in his opinion, India is approaching France in nuclear knowledge...
Progress would be much faster if the U.S. would release more details of non-military technology. Dr. Bhabha believes that Indian physicists can solve eventually all the practical problems of building and operating power reactors, but he does not see why they should have to. In most cases American researchers have been over the ground. Keeping their findings secret will only delay the Indians for a few years. Sooner or later, he is convinced, India will be dotted with nuclear power stations doing the duty of the oil, coal and water power that nature did not provide...