Word: inert
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When they were first synthesized in the late 1920s, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs % for short) seemed too good to be true. These remarkable chemicals, consisting of chlorine, fluorine and carbon atoms, are nontoxic and inert, meaning they do not combine easily with other substances. Because they vaporize at low temperatures, CFCs are perfect as coolants in refrigerators and propellant gases for spray cans. Since CFCs are good insulators, they are standard ingredients in plastic-foam materials like Styrofoam. Best of all, the most commonly used CFCs are simple, and therefore cheap, to manufacture...
...large quantities of concentrated fuel, designers propose to build a series of four small-scale, modular reactors that use fuel in such small quantities that their cores could not achieve meltdown temperatures under any circumstances. The fuel would be packed inside tiny heat-resistant ceramic spheres and cooled by inert helium gas. Then the whole apparatus would be buried belowground. Lawrence Lidsky, an M.I.T. professor of nuclear engineering, calls this an "inherently safe" approach: it relies on the laws of nature, rather than human intervention, to prevent a major accident...
Finally, Bush tends to lose concentration at times when he cannot be convinced his attention is required. Aides say that trait explains such "abnormalities" as his shockingly inert role in the Iran-contra affair. It also accounts, they say, for the marked improvement in his speaking style between the middle primaries, when Bush was not fully involved in political theater, and the postconvention period, when he appreciated that the stakes were high...
Moonie, Kona and Ed Blechner's ten other sled dogs lie inert in the August heat, dreaming, no doubt, of a 50-mile run at 20 below. Blechner, meanwhile, tries to explain his odyssey from Queens to Addison. He has not attended synagogue regularly since late childhood, when, in preparation for his Bar Mitzvah, he walked to shul, or synagogue, and avoided automobiles and telephones on the Sabbath. Then came varsity football at Union College and Outward Bound's Hurricane Island School and a world beyond Great Neck. "I used to feel funny among Jews," he recalls. "I had taken...
...flight seem, most experts are confident that humans can survive the journey to Mars. But in what shape will they be when they get there? Says NASA Physicist Wendell Mendell: "It doesn't do you much good to deliver a human to the Martian surface if that human is inert for a time after landing...