Word: krypton
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...effect tossed on the scrap heap. A General Conference on Weights and Measures, meeting at Paris, made a wave length of light the new official standard of length. The meter is now denned as 1,650,763.73 wave lengths of the orange-red light given off by electrically excited krypton 86, a rare gas extracted from the atmosphere. The U.S. inch is 41.929.399 wave lengths...
...fission process, nuclear reactors produce a gas-Krypton 85-which hangs in the atmosphere. The U.S. can take careful readings of Krypton 85 in the air, subtract what it knows it has put there, subtract what the British have put there, and assign the balance to Russian origin. Making an even less exact calculation, U.S. experts guesstimate that the Russians must have something like 3,000 nuclear weapons. The U.S. may have at least three times that, but it does not make much difference: nuclear parity is achieved when each has enough to destroy the other...
...Committee on Meteorology also had worries. Nuclear power plants give off radioactive gases, some of which are difficult to control or get rid of. In the year 2000, the committee figured, the world's atomic power plants will be producing enough krypton 85 to raise appreciably the radioactivity of the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Other gases given off at fuel-processing plants, e.g., iodine 131, can do even worse on a local scale. The committee points out that unfavorable weather conditions around a processing plant can concentrate the gases intensely...
...only decision left will be what kind of light waves to use as a standard. The Germans favor light given off by atoms of a krypton isotope. The Russians prefer cadmium 114. U.S. scientists would like to use mercury 198, which they have been making out of gold in a nuclear reactor...
...first Dr. Jones had to measure the blood flow by holding a Geiger counter over the muscle of a subject who had inhaled a radioisotope of an inert gas such as krypton or argon. That was expensive and took a long time. Now, by measuring the carbon dioxide generated in muscles during exercise, Dr. Jones can get his answers in a few minutes...