Word: hydrogen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...their own atom bomb is incontrovertible. But the allegation that physicists who are still idols in the world scientific community cooperated with the espionage network? "Gumshoe braggadocio," fumes Richard Rhodes, author of a 1986 Pulitzer- prizewinning book on the making of the A-bomb. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and a fervent anticommunist, scoffs at the idea that Fermi would ever have cooperated with the Soviets, because Fermi "clearly opposed the Stalinist nightmare...
...judge Peninsula's recent issues by the standard is akin to judging atom bombs weak because they're not hydrogen bombs...
...temperature climbed above 100 million degrees -- three times hotter than the core of the sun -- causing the mixture to ignite suddenly in a nuclear- fusion reaction, the same kind that takes place inside stars and hydrogen bombs. More than 3 million watts of energy began pouring from the superheated gas inside the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor, and for the four seconds or so that the experiment lasted, the hottest spot in the solar system by a sizable margin was in Plainsboro, New Jersey...
...process would be so hard. It had been relatively easy to get energy through nuclear fission, the breaking apart of such heavy atoms as uranium. That led to A-bombs and today's nuclear power plants. But fusion -- the forcing together of light atomic nuclei, like those of hydrogen -- can release even more energy. The problem is that hydrogen nuclei carry a positive electric charge, and thus they repel one another; they have to be slammed together with terrific force before they will stick. In an H-bomb, that force is provided by a powerful explosive -- an A-bomb...
...main attraction of fusion is the potentially limitless fuel supply. The ideal fuel is not plain hydrogen but the formula used last week: a mixture of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen that have extra neutrons in their nuclei. Even though they're rarer than ordinary hydrogen, scientists estimate that enough of these two isotopes could be extracted from the top 2 in. of water in Lake Erie to match the energy in all the world's oil reserves...