Word: cerium
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Unofficial Watch. Peter King sent an assistant on a rush trip to the Virgin Islands; soon the aide was back with jugs of sludge precipitated chemically from 2,500 gal. of six-month-old rain water. The stuff was faintly hot, containing the radioactive cerium and yttrium that are typical products of nuclear fission. As of then, King knew he had a quick and easy way to detect nuclear explosions...
...September, 1949 King heard from the Air Force of indications that the Russians might have successfully tested an atomic bomb. He sent a rush message-"To hell with the monthly schedule"-for fresh rain water from Kodiak. Within a few hours, he was able to identify radioactive cerium, which could only have come from a nuclear explosion. The U.S. had had no recent A-bomb tests. There was only one possible conclusion-and a few days later, President Harry Truman announced to the world the news, picked up by Peter King's Operation Rainbarrel, that the Russians had broken...
...radiating bismuth in an atomic pile, costs about $10 per curie. SNAP's charge is the equivalent of 3,000 curies, bringing the price of fuel in the capsule to $30,000. An AEC official explained that some cheaper isotope might later be substituted for polonium. If cerium 144 can be used, the unit cost might be as low as $600 per battery...
...people lived on radioactive isotopes, the cost of living would be no source of worry. Last week the Atomic Energy Commission was offering cesium 137 for $1 to $2 per curie* (according to amount) instead of the former $14. Cerium 144 has dropped from $1,000 to $1 to $2. Other radioisotopes are marked down in proportion...
...stirred up millions of tons of quick-settling coral dust. First radioactive material from the May 21 explosion was brought home by the tuna boat Stiruga Maru. Analyzed by Dr. Kenjiro Kimura of Tokyo University, it proved to contain a familiar array of fission products-ruthenium, rhodium, tellurium, iodine, cerium, neodymium, etc.-as well as uranium 237 and neptunium 239. This combination of elements indicated that the explosion was the "fission-fusion-fission" type, which gets much of its energy from the fission of normally inactive uranium...