Word: hydrogenate
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Each Sunday the New York Times runs a carefully informative column called Sciences in Review. The text for last Sunday's article was "Could a Hydrogen Cobalt Bomb Be Made Big Enough to Destroy the Human Race...
...seems one could not, not right now at least. The column presented the arguments of two physicists named Arnold and Szilard both of whom had much to do with the original atomic bomb. Szilard had claimed last April that a Hydrogen-Cobalt bomb would distribute enough radioactivity around the earth to wipe out everybody. Arnold recently disagreed, estimating that for $40,000,000,000 such a bomb could be built, but that the bomb's explosion would leave some areas relatively uncontaminated, some people relatively alive...
Tritium is the big brother of the hydrogen family. Ordinary hydrogen has one lone proton in its nucleus with an electron circling around it. Deuterium (heavy hydrogen) has one proton and one neutron in its nucleus. Tritium (heavy heavy hydrogen) has one proton and two neutrons. It is feebly radioactive, with a half-life of about twelve years. Drs. Libby and Grosse detected it through its radiation in samples of heavy (deuterium-containing) water. Its presence in heavy water had been suspected for some time, but not conclusively proved...
Natural tritium is much too scarce to help the makers of hydrogen bombs, who will have to synthesize their tritium, presumably in a chain-reacting pile. The only use for it in sight at present is to trace the vertical motions of ocean currents. Since short-lived tritium originates in the atmosphere, only water that has been on the surface recently should have a full complement of it. Water that has spent many years in the ocean depths should be tritium-free...
...TIME, Sept. 26 et seq.). He has won 80 of his cases, lost only seven. The rest, including the big ones, are still pending. But lately there have been hints that Bergson would have less & less to do. One hint: When the Government decided to build the hydrogen bomb, it handed the big job to Du Pont. Washington no longer seemed to be worried that Du Pont, which the trustbusters had said was too big, would have to grow much bigger to build the bomb...