Word: pile
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...spring of 1945, with the Nazis on the verge of defeat, a small group of scientists crowded into a cave in southern Germany for one last attempt at starting a chain reaction in their uranium pile. It was far too late to produce an atomic bomb that could help the fatherland. But the scientists-unaware that the U.S. had accomplished the feat more than two years before-were determined that Germany should produce the world's first nuclear chain reaction before the war ended. Their experiment, like the entire German A-bomb program, ended in failure...
...Germans turned to heavy water for a moderator. However, they were hamstrung for the remainder of the war when an Allied sabotage team crippled the world's only heavy-water plant, at Vemork in occupied Norway. Meanwhile, Enrico Fermi had constructed the world's first working uranium pile in Chicago-using graphite as a moderator...
Lethal Burst. Even if a respite from the incessant Allied bombing had given them more time, it now seems doubtful that German scientists could have worked their way past their repeated oversights and gaffes. When U.S. troops captured the site of the final uranium pile in Haigerloch, Germany, accompanying U.S. scientists were astonished to discover that the Germans had made absolutely no provision for protecting themselves against atomic radiation. Had a successful chain reaction begun on the day of the last test, the Nazis' nuclear physicists would have been showered by a harmful, and perhaps lethal, burst of radiation...
...danger of destruction by decay. Until the last decade, film was made from a nitrate base, both flammable and subject to erosion. The film archivist works against time: the older the film, the more likely the chances of physical degeneration -- and the chance of its vanishing forever in a pile of dust...
Columbia broke to an early lead and then continued to pile up points. Roger Walazsek totalled 20 and another sopho more star, Heyward Dotson...