Word: fissioning
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Both uranium and hydrogen bombs will leave some radioactive residues. If a uranium bomb is exploded near the ground (as the first one at Alamogordo), the "fission products" make a small area radioactive for a long time. But most of the fission products rise high in the atmosphere. When the bomb is exploded 1,80b ft. above the ground (as at Hiroshima), virtually all the fission products are carried up, where they do no damage...
...better get a move on." Lilienthal set four years from now as the date for a practical demonstration of electric power production, 10 years before we get a bigger, but still high-cost plant, and 25 years before a "substantial part" of our electrical energy could be produced by fission. Could this be speeded up? "That's something I'd better not comment on," but there was the impression that something could be done...
Last week the laboratory showed off some new and weird equipment designed to make isotope production both faster and safer. The isotopes are made by a chain-reacting pile in a pale green, blocky building. Some of them are fission products that accumulate in the pile's uranium fuel. Others are formed in aluminum cans of raw material "cooked" by the pile's neutrons...
...forming "paperbag" nuclei out of smaller units. Deuterium (heavy hydrogen), for instance, has one proton and one neutron in its nucleus. When two deuterium nuclei are fused together, they form a helium nucleus (two protons and two neutrons) that weighs less than two deuterium nuclei. As in uranium fission the weight loss turns into free energy. It is this fusion of lighter nuclei into helium that will power the hydrogen bomb...
Spreading the Uranium. There may be much military importance in two side effects of the new fusion techniques. In fission bombs, a great deal of the uranium is scattered before it can react. But in a hydrogen bomb, even a small one, the ingredients packed around the uranium core could be induced to generate a large number of free neutrons. These would make more of the uranium react, thus stepping up the efficiency of the core's explosion...