Word: fissionable
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Engineering extravaganzas are nothing new to Taylor. As a nuclear scientist at Los Alamos, N. Mex., in the 1950s, he designed the largest fission bomb that had ever been exploded. In the 1960s he worked on the U.S. Air Force's Project Orion, an aborted fission-powered spaceship that was supposed to explore the solar system. For now, Taylor is happy with his melting ice mound. Says he: "Standing on that pile of ice is pure adventure. We are developing the first renewable-energy cooling system that is competitive with electrical air conditioning...
...world is like the bomb's own-thus proving that people have achieved no mastery over nature that their stupidity has not neutralized. The mind made the bomb, the mind denied it, and the mind can stop it cold. If that should sound impossible, consider how impossible nuclear fission must have seemed at the start, or how impossible the Holocaust, or how impossible to the children of Hiroshima that Aug. 6, 1945, would turn out to be anything but another summer...
...eyes. Flashbulbs might explode in front of his chiseled face, but the light they cast wasn't nearly as bright as the curious beams that burned beneath his brows. He possessed a lambent, almost impatient genius, one that illuminated and absorbed the dark secrets of quantum mechanics and atomic fission. While other scientists stumbled in the darkness, he moved with confidence and ease. He projected his glance into the dark corners of the universe, saw the force that drove the furnace of the stars, and then he brought that force to earth. After four years of refining, J. Robert Oppenheimer...
...reactor vessel, in which the fission takes place, is "the exact same design as the vessel that came within 40 minutes of melting down at Three Mile Island," Thayer said...
...remote solution to many of atomic energy's problems may be nuclear fusion. The fission reactors now in use create energy by splitting atoms apart, but in fusion, atoms are smashed together. This method is potentially cheaper and safer. Experts, however, say that the technology is at least 25 years...