Word: lithium
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...Fusion" of light elements, on which the hydrogen bomb depends, is the senior source of nuclear energy. More than 20 years ago, at Cambridge University, Physicists John D. Cockcroft and Ernest T. S. Walton shot hydrogen nuclei (protons) from a primitive high-voltage machine at a lithium target. A few of the protons hit lithium nuclei. The product of each such reaction: two atoms of helium and 17.3 million electron-volts of energy...
...injected a solution containing boron, a common, stable element with an atomic weight of 10. But under neutron bombardment, boron-10 changes to an excited boron-11, which lives about one-hundredth of a trillionth of a second. In that infinitesimal fraction of time before it decays to stable lithium, it shoots out alpha particles...
...physics prize was divided between Britain's Sir John D. Cockcroft and Ulsterman E.T.S. Walton. Working as a team at Cambridge, England, they built a high-voltage machine in 1932, seven years before the discovery of uranium fission, which smashed lithium atoms, turning each into two helium nuclei and a powerful jolt of energy. The Cockcroft-Walton reaction is inefficient, but the energy that it produces is genuinely nuclear, released when mass is turned into energy...
Under the Alpher-Herman hypothesis, the gas, constantly expanding, soon cooled enough to allow an occasional proton to join with a neutron, forming the two-part nucleus of heavy hydrogen. Then, little by little, larger nuclei were formed, such as lithium, boron and carbon. Most of the nuclei grew by capturing more neutrons. When they captured too many, they became unstable. Then some of the neutrons inside them turned into protons and electrons. The electrons shot off as high-energy beta particles...
...other hints of Richter's suggest that he may have been working along the lines of the Cockcroft reaction. Richter remarked that he had bought a special photoelectric cell for his experiments. Such a cell would be useful for observing flashes of light given off by the lithium-helium reaction. Richter also said that he was using an Argentine material-and Argentina is a producer of lithium. The main defect in the method: only a few particles in a million prove effective, reducing the efficiency of such processes to the vanishing point. Proof by Isotope. The consensus last week...