Word: fissionability
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...filed claims and names. The Russians are calling 104 "kurchatovium" (after their A-bomb pioneer, Igor Kurchatov) and 105 "niels bohrium" (for the famed Danish physicist). Americans have dubbed 104 "rutherfordium" (after the English scientist Ernest Rutherford) and 105 "hahnian" (for German Chemist Otto Hahn, who discovered nuclear fission...
...workings of a nuclear explosive and included it as part of a bomb threat that terrified Orlando, Fla., for 36 hours. Nor is cost a deterrent. University of Virginia Professor Mason Willrich, a nuclear-arms expert, estimates that a weapons fabrication and assembly plant that can manufacture ten fission warheads annually costs about $8 million to build. Each 20-kiloton warhead would run less than $15 million, plus the cost of the fissionable material. This is within the reach of even the most impoverished nation willing to divert resources from social programs...
More Tinder. Plutonium (Pu-239) is not found in nature, but will become increasingly abundant. It is the artificial byproduct of the fission that takes place within nuclear power generators. After complicated processing, it can be converted into a warhead, and that is what worries experts. As the soaring price of fossil fuels encourages an increasing number of nations to buy nuclear plants to generate electricity, substantial amounts of Pu-239 will become available. "There will simply be more and more tinder lying around," observes Francois Duchene, the director of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies...
Died. Sir James Chadwick, 82, British Nobel laureate physicist who in 1932 discovered the neutron, the atomic particle devoid of any electrical charge, later did work in nuclear fission and led the team of British scientists who contributed to the Manhattan Project; of a heart attack; in Cambridge, England...
...Dublin and a town to the north, killing 28 people. The event gave special interest to Author McPhee's thesis, which is that right now one fairly skilled technician, using easily obtainable equipment and information, and easily stolen uranium 235 or plutonium 239, could make a nuclear fission bomb. The bomb certainly would be small enough to fit into a Volkswagen, and perhaps into a golf...