Word: fissionable
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Precious Dust. Worst damage would be done by a nuclear explosion, fission or fusion. It would contaminate the lunar atmosphere with radioactive gases and sprinkle the moon's surface with radioactive debris. Almost as bad would be the big, backward-pushing retrorockets that would be needed to bring a small packet of instruments to a soft landing on the moon; they would require the release of so much burned fuel that the moon's tenuous atmosphere would never be the same again...
GENEVA, a place where statesmen once felt in command of history, was jammed last week with men who shape the world. As 5,000 scientists from 67 countries met for the second U.N. Atoms for Peace conference, the fission-and-fusion future unfolded in a staggering display of brains and machinery. Nobody topped the U.S. effort, a hugely successful reactor exhibit spiced with news that the world's first controlled thermonuclear reaction may have been achieved at Los Alamos. For a report on one of the biggest scientific meetings ever held, see SCIENCE, Monster Conference...
...Much more interesting to the public was the general feeling among the scientist delegates, as expressed in interviews or press conferences. The first Geneva conference, 1955, was notable for unaccustomed fraternization between scientists from Communist and non-Communist countries. It also took the secrecy lid off the technology of fission reactors that burn uranium or other heavy elements...
...began listening for the faint echoes of its own radar signals to earth. On the igth echo-800 ft. above the rooftops of Hiroshima-a powder charge sent one uranium mass bullet-ing through a hollow shaft into the other mass. In one fifteen-hundredth of a microsecond, fission began. In that dreadful instant a city died, and 70,000 of its inhabitants...
Another possibility is a rocket engine that uses nuclear fusion of heavy hydrogen instead of fission of uranium. No controlled fusion reactor has yet been constructed for any purpose, and making a light one for rockets will be much harder than making a heavy one for power stations. But the nuclear enthusiasts are not discouraged. Deuterium is cheap, they say, and even if the entire stock were shot out of the nozzle, the fuel for a flight would cost only...