Word: fissionable
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...Lewis Strauss, Joe I meant just one thing: the U.S. must get to work, on a "crash" basis, on building the "super." The super's vast explosive potentialities were based not on splitting atoms (as with the fission, or A-bomb), but in fusing atoms of one element to form another (e.g., hydrogen into helium) through in tense heat. AEC Physicist Edward Teller figured out in 1945 that a superbomb was theoretically possible. In 1947 he came within one step of working out the theoretical mechanics (at a seminar in Los Alamos attended by Dr. Klaus Fuchs...
...steel like paper. The planes themselves are approaching speeds at which aluminum aircraft skins would lose their strength, then melt. Nor is heat the only problem. Building of the first atomic reactors disclosed the fact that most metals absorb or "eat up" the atomic neutrons needed to provide the fission and motive power...
Five emperors, a dozen kings and a score of minor dynasts have vanished in the wars, revolutions and other dislocations of the 20th century. Britain's empire, too, is diminished, yet neither hot war nor cold war, nuclear nor social fission has tarnished the bright gold of the British crown. In an age that tends to reject ritual, scoff at virtue and call magic coincidence the crown that was set this week on the head of Elizabeth II was more generally accepted because better understood, better loved because more respected, than it had ever been before...
...Cumberland station, North American's plant will also be able to produce atomic fuel, i.e., plutonium. But its main purpose will be the study of practical production of electric power. Liquid metal (probably sodium) circulating through the reactor will absorb the tremendous heat generated by atomic fission. Piped through a water boiler, the superheated metal will produce steam. The steam, in turn, will drive a conventional turbogenerator...
Most of the "unnatural" samples came after U.S. atomic tests in Nevada, but some of them were collected in Montana when no U.S. fission products could have been in the air. The radioactive material presumably came from the Russian explosion announced by President Truman on October 3, 1951. Another sample may have come from a second Russian test a few weeks later...