Word: fissionable
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Does fallout from nuclear testing endanger the health of the world? Last week only Soviet tests were spraying deadly fission products into the atmosphere, but 20-odd shots had been fired in only seven weeks, and from Japan to Norway, from Canada to India, fears and protests formed an anxious chorus. Statesmen and housewives asked scientists for reassurance. They got little: the scientists were worried...
...TROPOSPHERIC FALLOUT. In temperate latitudes, most of the dust, and part of the cloud, never gets higher than some 35,000 ft. This collection of nuclear fission products is the tropospheric fallout, and since the troposphere is the part of the earth's atmosphere that contains rain clouds, even its finest particles of radioactive material are likely to be carried back to the ground by falling snowflakes or water droplets...
...deadly stuff is hanging many miles above the earth, its short-lived isotopes disintegrate and virtually disappear. But two of its most dangerous constituents, strontium 90 and cesium 137, would not fade into harmlessness even if they floated in the stratosphere for a century. And fact is that few fission products stay up nearly so long...
When did the Russians start testing? The Russians exploded their first nuclear device in September 1949, only four years and two months after the first U.S. test at Alamogordo, N. Mex.. in July 1945. The Russian test involved a primitive fission bomb similar to the two U.S. bombs used in World War II, but the Russians must have started work immediately on the more advanced hydrogen bomb. On Aug. 12. 1953. they exploded their first test H-bomb, only nine months after the first U.S. H-bomb test at Eniwetok Island in the Pacific...
...emphasis has already produced an important breakthrough in fabrication of superconductors i.e., metals which when chilled to absolute zero lose their resistance to electricity. Wah Chang labs are now making colum-bium-zirconium alloy wire that scientists believe can be used to utilize the energy released by controlled nuclear fission...