Word: nuclear
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Atomic Power. Commercial atomic power plants, says the AEC, are not just around the corner. Two "nuclear reactors" for producing power have been authorized and should be in operation in two or three years. But the commission warns that they will not be commercial. It thinks that fairly practical plants, still experimental, will be available within ten years...
Construction. The AEC tells little about its vast building program, expected to cost $1,250,000,000. The Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, with its nuclear reactor, is "well under way." Fifteen thousand workers are busy at Hanford, Wash., presumably expanding the vast plutonium works. The super-secret weapons plant and laboratory at Los Alamos, N. Mex. are being renovated and extended...
...science's most exciting-and most secret-projects is adapting atomic energy to aircraft. Since atomic fuel (plutonium or uranium 235) would have over two million times as much energy as gasoline, a "nuclear-powered" plane could fly on & on, round & round the earth. It could fly at its top speed all the time, and land with the same weight (and about the same amount of reserve fuel) that it took off with...
...Andrew Kalitinsky of Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corp. (which is working under the Atomic Energy Commission) recently explained the problem at a Manhattan meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers. In outline, the job looks simple. A "nuclear reactor" (essentially a controlled, slow-exploding atom bomb) gives off most of its energy as heat. One way to do the trick is to put a reactor in place of the combustion chambers of a turbojet engine (see chart). A compressor forces air into the forward end of the engine. Heated and expanded by the nuclear reactor, the air shoots toward the rear...
Probably the toughest problem of all is how to keep from killing the crew by radiation. As Dr. Kalitinsky puts it: "The radiation intensities encountered in nuclear reactors must be reduced by factors of many billion before they are safe for the human organism...