Word: inertness
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...Study of History is dominated by an image of genius. The view is of the chasm of precipitous time. On its sheer rock walls, as the eye of the spectator adjusts itself to the somber light of human history, are seen the bodies of climbers. Some, prone and inert, lie on the ledges to which they have hurtled to death. Some dangle, arrested, over the void as they cling by their fingernails to cliffs too steep for their exhausted strength to scale. Above these, a few still strain upward in a convulsive effort to attain a height hidden from them...
Present piles (at Oak Ridge, Hanford and Chicago) are kept cool, but power piles will run at high temperature. Among the reacting uranium rods of a power pile will circulate a chemically inert gas, hot as a dragon's breath, deadly with radioactivity. This will heat a conventional boiler, yielding high-pressure steam, which, the scientists hope, will not be too radioactive to use in a turbine...
...Representatives of the fanatical Government minority, they rule the vast, inert, defenseless Russian masses, as all minorities must, chiefly by means of an omnipresent secret police and its informers, by intricate economic controls that make every Russian dependent on the Government for his livelihood, and by hope-hope for a better future, which never comes, but which beckons with each new Five-Year Plan from the disastrous present. But when these controls creak under the enormous task, purges are a summary corrective-at once a technique of dictatorship and a reflex of fear...
...trained other officers in air-combat intelligence at the Navy's prep school on Rhode Island's Quonset Point. He decided that they caught on fast because their work had purpose. Says he: "I don't believe in teaching any course just crammed full of inert material...
...heard no hint of nonexplosive plutonium. But behind the Manhattan Project's secrecy curtain, it might have been created as early as 1943. Some physicists mentioned plutonium 240, which they thought might be made from the explosive plutonium (Pu-239), or from natural uranium. If it proved inert, like U-238, it could be mixed with Pu-239 to make it non-detonating. There is reason to think that both varieties of plutonium may be produced simultaneously, and ready-mixed...