Word: deuterium
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...eyes riveted on a bank of computer monitors. They waited anxiously as technicians injected less than 1 oz. of tritium gas into the doughnut-shaped hollow at the heart of a 50-ft.- tall reactor in the next room. Then they waited some more as the tritium mixed with deuterium gas already inside and the combination was heated with powerful radio beams...
...main attraction of fusion is the potentially limitless fuel supply. The ideal fuel is not plain hydrogen but the formula used last week: a mixture of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen that have extra neutrons in their nuclei. Even though they're rarer than ordinary hydrogen, scientists estimate that enough of these two isotopes could be extracted from the top 2 in. of water in Lake Erie to match the energy in all the world's oil reserves...
...Space Administration announced that Venus may have been covered by a shallow sea, 25 ft. to 75 ft. deep, 3 billion years ago. Data sent back by the Pioneer probe on its final plunge through Venus' atmosphere last October revealed an unusually high concentration of heavy hydrogen, also called deuterium, which can be explained only if the planet was once much wetter...
...neutrons and a proton in its nucleus, occurs naturally in minute quantities in raindrops and groundwater. But the radioactive gas took on strategic importance in 1952, when the U.S. exploded its first hydrogen bomb. That explosion demonstrated the destructive force that can be released when tritium fuses with deuterium, another hydrogen isotope, to yield helium and a burst of nuclear energy. Today, tritium is used both to enhance the power of atom bombs and in the trigger mechanism of the far more destructive H-bomb. Because it decays at the rate of 5.5% a year, the gas must be regularly...
Silvera leads a team in the Lyman Labs that is using a high-pressure diamond anvil to crush together a palladium and deuterium cell. Silvera says their first test, which failed to release heat or emit subatomic particles that are expected by-products of fusion, could have failed because of accidental leaking by the liquid deuterium...