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...Middle Eastern sands. Few of the celebrated French engineers De Lesseps invited to inspect his plan approved it (among the doubters: Gustave Eiffel, the tower builder). The doubts were soon borne out: in 1889, De Lesseps' company went bankrupt. By that time, the French had moved 50 million cubic meters of earth?two-thirds of the amount moved at Suez. In the process, some 20,000 workers died of malaria and yellow fever (whose causes were thought to be noxious jungle vapors and immoral living rather than bacteria-carrying mosquitoes). Originally known as "the Great Frenchman," De Lesseps came...
...join enough deuterium and tritium nuclei to sustain a fusion reaction requires heroic efforts. Deuterium-tritium gas mixtures must be heated to as much as 100 million degrees Celsius and be maintained at that temperature for about one second at a density of about 1014 (100 trillion) particles per cubic centimeter. Scientists have taken two different routes in their efforts to achieve these critical conditions. One is to use a "magnetic bottle" -an enclosing magnetic field-to contain the hydrogen fuel. The other is to use lasers or electron beams to make miniature hydrogen "bombs" out of tiny pellets...
...magic combination of confinement time, temperature and plasma density necessary to sustain fusion. At the Princeton University Plasma Physics Laboratory, scientists regularly heat the plasma in the Princeton Large Torus until it glows like an ectoplasmic bagel and have just achieved a density of 1014 particles per cubic centimeter, a confinement time of .10 second and a temperature of 35 million degrees Celsius...
...scope of McCullough's book is enormous: he illuminates the arenas of politics, finances, science, engineering and sociology. He moves through his subject like one of those 95-ton Bucyrus steam shovels that gnawed their way across Panama. Facts are turned up by the cubic yard, sorted and arranged into a smooth, efficient narrative. Statistics sometimes tend to overwhelm the reader, but there are moments when numbers become all too human. Said one West Indian laborer about the frequent dynamite accidents: "The flesh of men flew in the air like birds many days...
DESALINATION. Though Israel-which gets little or no rain for up to eight months of the year-draws much of its water from the Jordan River, it also gets part of its supply from the sea. Israeli desalination plants now desalt 3 million cubic meters (7.8 billion gal.) of sea water every year. The cost is high ($1 per cubic meter), but the Israelis have little choice. In Saudi Arabia, where cost is no object, the government has embarked on a $12 billion program that will enable it to desalt 2.3 billion liters (600 million...