Word: hiroshima
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...political successor, Jawaharlal Nehru-warned Indians that nothing would help their enemies more "than for us to lose our sense of perspective and to undertake measures that undermine the basic progress of the country." Yet India has just exploded an atomic device-somewhat smaller than the one dropped on Hiroshima beneath the sands of the northwestern Rajasthan desert-that makes it the sixth member of the world's nuclear club...
...sustain a chain reaction -the familiar energy-producing process in which tiny, fast-moving neutrons released by the breakup (fission) of one unstable atom smash into the nuclei of neighboring atoms, causing them to split. The common reactor fuel-which was also used in the bomb that leveled Hiroshima-is a fissionable isotope of uranium called U-235. But U-235 accounts for only about one out of every 140 atoms of uranium in nature, and it takes enormously sophisticated methods to separate even a small amount of the isotope from the more common, nonfissionable uranium 238. Most of today...
...gleaned from any number of public documents, some of them published by the AEC. Essentially, all that is needed to achieve a blast is to bring together a sufficient amount of properly shaped fissionable material fast enough to initiate a massive chain reaction. To do that, the Hiroshima bomb used the so-called gunbarrel technique: both ends of a heavy metal pipe were stuffed with U-235 and the charge at one end was used as a projectile. To detonate the bomb, the U-235 projectile was hurled by conventional explosives down the barrel and into the mass...
...given time, one-third [of the 43 reactors in the U.S.] are shut down for repairs and other problems," Nader said. The amount of radioactive material contained in a single reactor varies from one to two thousands times as much as was contained in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, he said...
...redundant safety features that the chance of a major accident seems infinitesimal. The critics cite "Murphy's Law"-if anything can go wrong, it will-and point out that after a year of operation, the average big nuclear plant contains 1,000 times as much radioactivity as the Hiroshima bomb...