Word: deuterium
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...other stars, fusion releases enormous amounts of energy-but only small amounts of dangerous radioactivity -through the combination of light atoms of hydrogen to form heavier atoms of helium. The earth's seas contain an almost unlimited store of an isotope of hydrogen especially suitable as fusion fuel: deuterium, or heavy hydrogen...
...controlled fusion, as opposed to the uncontrolled variety in an H-bomb, is extremely difficult to achieve. Not only must the deuterium be confined in a dense plasma, but it also must be heated to temperatures of some hundred million degrees. Even if fusion research is vastly expanded, thermonuclear power will probably not be available as an energy source for decades to come...
...Columbia's Dr. Paolo Franzini had in mind when he went to work with Brookhaven's synchrotron in January 1965. Along with his wife, Dr. Juliet Lee-Franzini, Drs. Charles Baltay and Lawrence Kirsch, he fired particles called pi mesons into a bubble chamber filled with liquid deuterium. About one-thirtieth of the times that a pi meson hit a deuterium nucleus, out came the eta meson, which decays into three pions. The pions streaked through the bubble chamber, the positive leaving a line that curved to the right, the negative peeling off to the left...
Newtonian or Quantum? After exposing the cylinder to light of a uniform wave length for periods ranging from half an hour to ten hours, the scientists analyzed its contents to detect molecules of deuterium hydride. The process was repeated, each time with a light beam of longer wave length and lower energy, until they failed to find molecules of deuterium hydride in the cylinder-no matter how long the gases had been exposed to the light. At this particular wave length, it seemed clear, the deuterium atoms had not been given enough velocity to split the hydrogen molecules and combine...
...Kuppermann and White, this suggested that the wave length of light used in the previous exposure provided the minimum energy needed to cause the reaction. They then determined the energy carried by a photon at that wave length and calculated how much of it had been imparted to the deuterium atom when the deuterium iodide molecule was split. Their result: one-third of an electron volt...