Word: fissionable
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...achieved. Nothing has come into the open, and Atomic Energy Commission officials refuse, sometimes nervously, to answer questions touching remotely on the subject. But the rumors have enough substance to worry electric power companies. In the absence of assurances to the contrary, some of them are afraid that the fission (uranium) power plants they intend to build in the near future may be hopelessly outmoded before they are finished...
...reported to be working hard on this radical device, but the only fusion reaction demonstrated so far is an uncontrolled one: the hydrogen bomb. In the bomb, light elements (isotopes of hydrogen and probably lithium) are caused to join into helium by the intense heat of an exploding fission (uranium) bomb. Something more tractable is needed to start a fusion reaction in a peaceful power plant...
...megaton bomb (equivalent in energy to 10 million tons of TNT), says Libby, creates 1,100 Ibs. of radioactive fission products. Airborne for one day and then spread evenly over an area of 100,000 square miles, it would give each unsheltered person a dose of 67 roentgens per day. This is not far from the strength of the "snow" that fell on the Marshall Islanders.* They survived because they were evacuated promptly and cared for well, but as Libby remarks in an understatement, evacuation of 100,000 square miles (more than twice the size of New York State...
...quite came off on schedule last week. Especially the atom bomb tests in what the announcers persisted in calling "Doomtown, Nevada." Faithful televiewers turned out at 8 a.m. for six successive mornings only to be met each time with fresh postponements. But this failure to make a rendezvous with fission only brought out the essential pluck of the network newscasters. CBS's Charles Collingwood tried hard to keep his end up by filling in with a telecast from Las Vegas where, amid the clatter of one-armed bandits, he solemnly asked the proprietor of The Sands Hotel...
...electrons must also govern the macrocosms of intergalactic space. Einstein's scratchpad theorems broke through the thought barriers of knowledge and rewrote the basic scientific law of the universe. The now-mundane miracle of television is a splinter off Einstein's achievement; the mushroom clouds of atomic fission and hydrogen fusion are his unwanted monuments; mankind's chance to turn earth-shaking force into good is his legacy...