Word: fissionability
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...been an open secret in the intelligence community that bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization have long lusted after nukes. The consensus in Washington is that the group does not have a true nuclear-fission device, though it may well have what is known as a radiological weapon or "dirty bomb"--a conventional explosive packed with radioactive debris. Whatever bin Laden's got, he has made any number of attempts to get more. As early as the mid-1990s, intelligence sources tell TIME, bin Laden's agents began cruising the black markets of Europe and Asia looking for pirated...
...seems ironic that nuclear energy is widely regarded as a greater environmental threat than dams, even though fission--with the jarring exceptions of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island--has caused relatively little harm. There may be huge calamities in its future, and its fiercely toxic fission products still have no demonstrably safe burial place. But dams, for all their material blessings, are responsible for some of the worst environmental tragedies in history...
...factory, built in 1982, is part of the fuel supply line for an experimental fast-breeder nuclear power plant. It is where fissionable U-235 is combined with nitric acid to produce uranium dioxide, which is then combined at another plant with plutonium to produce the enriched uranium pellets used as breeder fuel. According to JCO, workers inexplicably mixed far more than the normal amount of uranium--35.2 lbs. instead of 5.2 lbs.--with the acid. Then they used stainless-steel buckets rather than pipes--again, inexplicably--to pour the liquefied uranium into the tank. The high concentration of uranium...
...Pope and his team almost found nuclear fission in 1934 in the course of experiments in which, looking for radioactive transformations, they systematically bombarded one element after another with the newly discovered neutron. They missed by the thickness of the sheet of foil in which they wrapped their uranium sample; the foil blocked the fission fragments that their instruments would otherwise have recorded. It was a blessing in disguise. If fission had come to light in the mid-1930s, while the democracies still slept, Nazi Germany would have won a long lead toward building an atom bomb. In compensation, Fermi...
...Hitler had not hounded Jewish scientists out of Europe, the Anglo-American atom bomb program sparked by the discovery of fission late in 1938 would have found itself shorthanded. Most Allied physicists had already been put to work developing radar and the proximity fuse, inventions of more immediate value. Fermi and his fellow emigres--Hungarians Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller, German Hans Bethe--formed the heart of the bomb squad. In 1939, still officially enemy aliens, Fermi and Szilard co-invented the nuclear reactor at Columbia University, sketching out a three-dimensional lattice of uranium...