Word: fissioned
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...cancer is the use of "radioactive isotopes from the heart of the smashed atom." Now radioactive isotopes have something to do with atomic energy, but by no stretch of the imagination do they reside in the hearts of atoms nor are they released in the process of nuclear fission. There are several other bad errors...
When natural uranium is put in a chain-reacting pile, its U-235 atoms start splitting and yielding energy, "fission products" and free neutrons. Some of the neutrons are needed to split more U-235 atoms and keep the reaction going. Others are absorbed by impurities or escape from the pile. The rest enter the atoms of U-238, ultimately turn them into plutonium...
...plutonium or other nuclear fuel thus produced is larger than the U-235 consumed, the pile could continue in operation for a very long time. First the original U-235 would be consumed, yielding energy and plutonium made out of 11-238. Then some of the plutonium would fission, yielding energy and creating more atomic fuel. Theoretically, the process might continue until all the 11-238 is consumed. Natural uranium could yield something like 140 times as much energy as it would if only its U-235 were utilized...
...Ashes. The AEC does not claim immediate 100% efficiency. The accumulation of radioactive fission products as impurities in the uranium, for instance, will certainly cause trouble long before the action is complete. But the contaminated uranium could be purified and "recycled." The AEC did not say so, but there is a possibility that when the breeding process has been refined, the uranium can be run through the reactor again & again until essentially all of it has been turned into energy. The world might thus have a practically inexhaustible source of nuclear fuel...
...full, round figure alerted Washington's amateur physicists. According to fairly dependable estimates, the Hiroshima bomb developed not more than 10% of the fission energy present in its nuclear explosive. Perfect efficiency (probably impossible) would therefore give about ten times as much power, certainly not 1,000 times as much. So, figured the amateur physicists, the talkative Senator must have meant a bomb made out of hydrogen. It is well known that the conversion of hydrogen into helium is the nuclear reaction that gives the sun its energy...