Word: fusions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...portentous rumor is spreading fast through U.S. atomic industry: that a "controlled fusion" (hydrogen) reactor has been or may soon be achieved. Nothing has come into the open, and Atomic Energy Commission officials refuse, sometimes nervously, to answer questions touching remotely on the subject. But the rumors have enough substance to worry electric power companies. In the absence of assurances to the contrary, some of them are afraid that the fission (uranium) power plants they intend to build in the near future may be hopelessly outmoded before they are finished...
Both the Russians (on July 1 Soviet Scientist M. G. Meshchiryakov reported controlled fusion experiments) and the British, as well as the U.S.. are reported to be working hard on this radical device, but the only fusion reaction demonstrated so far is an uncontrolled one: the hydrogen bomb. In the bomb, light elements (isotopes of hydrogen and probably lithium) are caused to join into helium by the intense heat of an exploding fission (uranium) bomb. Something more tractable is needed to start a fusion reaction in a peaceful power plant...
Intermittent Control. Ways of controlling the reaction are under debate too. One way would be to make it intermittent, with a very small amount of nuclear fuel present at a time. This would make the fusion reactor analogous to a reciprocating gasoline engine, where minute amounts of fuel are ignited and burned in series. But it might also be possible to make the reaction proceed at the desired rate by changing in some way the physical conditions in the reaction chamber...
Although the military has considerable independence at the middle and lower levels, at the tope there is a fusion of military and civilian leadership. The report's writers said that there are personal conflicts among the top leaders, but not among the army and secret police...
...govern the macrocosms of intergalactic space. Einstein's scratchpad theorems broke through the thought barriers of knowledge and rewrote the basic scientific law of the universe. The now-mundane miracle of television is a splinter off Einstein's achievement; the mushroom clouds of atomic fission and hydrogen fusion are his unwanted monuments; mankind's chance to turn earth-shaking force into good is his legacy...