Word: fissioned
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...essential ingredient in many atomic weapons, plutonium can also be used in specially designed nuclear plants, called breeder reactors, to reduce the amount of uranium needed to sustain fission. Back in the 1950s, the U.S., Japan and several European countries argued that breeder reactors should be the keystone of their nuclear-energy strategy because fissionable uranium was scarce and expensive. Since then the amount of conventional nuclear fuel has increased and the economic incentive for developing breeders has disappeared. Japan has kept its program going, however, despite the dangers of accidents or plutonium theft by terrorists...
...Nuclear fission...
...Soviet stockpile, like the Soviet Union itself, mimics nuclear fission and splits into smaller pieces, the result could be a burst of proliferation throughout the Eurasian landmass. Just one example: if a free Ukraine were to have its own Bomb, Poland might want one too. Sooner or later, Germany would feel compelled to rethink its policy of remaining a nuclear have...
...public's dread centers on the radioactive elements that remain in spent fuel rods after atomic reactions. While such highly toxic fission products as strontium 90 and cesium 137 have half-lives of only about 30 years, other intensely radioactive substances like plutonium will endure for tens and even hundreds of millenniums, and are piling up fast. High-level waste -- that which is most radioactive -- from U.S. power plants is not voluminous. More than 30 years' worth totals 17,000 tons, a thimbleful compared with the slag that would result from generating equivalent power by burning coal. Yet this waste...
...Unlike fission, the other type of nuclear reaction in which large atomic nuclei split apart into smaller atoms, fusion does not produce significant quantities of radioactive materials...