Word: cesium
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Behind its barred windows sit 28 atomic clocks, four of them holding atoms of hydrogen and the rest cesium. When excited by lasers or irradiated with microwaves, the atoms begin to dance with an utterly regular vibration that's monitored by computer. Once each second, the results are fed into America's Master Clock; the measurements from this and similar clocks around the world are sent to the International Bureau of Weights and Measures outside Paris--the ultimate timekeeping authority. It is there, next Friday, that the pulsing of billions of atoms will officially signal that civilization's odometer...
...slyly asking my parents what time it was, but even this proved difficult, since they are in the normal-people habit of going to sleep before midnight and waking up at six to go to work. After a while, a friend directed me to The Atomic Clock, a cesium-based timekeeper maintained in a laboratory somewhere in France and used by scientists worldwide as the standard-setter for time on our planet...
...potentially staggering profits provide both opportunity and incentive for illegal trading. Many hustlers in Moscow brazenly offer to sell small quantities of what they claim to be spent nuclear fuel stolen from production facilities. Often the ingredients these scam artists pass off as "samples" are benign substances, like cesium 137 and low-enriched uranium, that cannot be used to make a bomb. But no one doubts that a market for the real stuff exists. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, membership in the world's nuclear club requires only 55 lbs. of highly enriched uranium...
...courier, claimed the material posed "no danger" and admitted it regularly used passenger trains to transport radioactive substances. In November a thief was arrested after carrying uranium-235 on the subway, and in December two men were arrested after riding with a stolen cache of potentially explosive cesium. Both materials can be deadly...
...have quietly moved back to their farm plots, where they consume contaminated animals and produce. "They would rather die here than live somewhere else," says Alexander Borovoi, a Russian nuclear physicist in charge of the sarcophagus. Some returned to find their homes pillaged of religious art. Although contaminated with cesium 137 and strontium 90, some of the icons have probably entered the world art market...