Word: lithium
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Outlawed Stamp. Not quite so funny were the new economic sanctions that Wilson slapped on Rhodesia. In addition to the embargo on Rhodesian tobacco and sugar (the nation's major crops), Britain also banned imports of asbestos (a $30 million export item last year), copper, lithium, chrome, iron, steel and meat. That made the embargo 95% complete. Simultaneously, Wilson ordered a halt to interest payments, dividends and pensions from Britain to Rhodesian residents, thus damming a flow of income that totaled some $25 million last year. He even outlawed Rhodesia's bright new independence postal stamp as British...
Peking is now believed capable of building several 20-to 30-kiloton nuclear devices a year, probably has enough fissionable material on hand to stage a second test at any time. Uranium is in good supply, as is lithium, an important H-bomb material...
White-Hot Metal. The most striking Middletown project is SNAP-50, a lightweight nuclear-power reactor designed to operate in space. Incorporating technical know-how gained on the airplane-engine project, this SNAP (for Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power) contains liquid lithium and gaseous potassium, tricky fluids that would drive most engine designers to seek liquid solace. Molten lithium is frightening stuff; it corrodes almost anything, and bursts into flame on contact with oxygen. Gaseous potassium, while not quite so bad, is hot and explosive...
...liquid lithium flows through the hot reactor core and emerges at 2,000° F. The tubes that carry it, made of zirconium-columbium alloy, run at near white heat. The lithium is piped through a heat exchanger and turns liquid potassium (boiling point, 1,400° F.) to high-pressure gas that runs a turbine producing 300 kw. to 1,000 kw. of electricity. The potassium gas goes to a wide, flat condenser to be turned back into a liquid (see diagram...
...problem: how to get rid of heat from the condenser. There is no air to cool it by convection; the only cooling comes from radiation, which increases sharply with temperature. If the working fluid were steam, an enormous condenser would be needed to radiate its low-grade heat. The lithium-potassium combination runs so hot that a fairly small condenser does...