Word: pile
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...Willey has a pile of credibility issues. For one, plenty of evidence contradicts her 60 Minutes description of Clinton's allegedly upsetting grope. Linda Tripp, of all people, told Starr's FBI agents last June that Willey was flirting with the President for months before the supposed incident. Tripp claimed that Willey, a White House volunteer, would call Tripp at home at night to find out Clinton's schedule so she could position herself nearby. Willey tried to work evening events at the White House and wore a particular cleavage-highlighting black dress...
...invented the nuclear reactor at Columbia University, sketching out a three-dimensional lattice of uranium slugs dropped into holes in black, greasy blocks of graphite moderator, with sliding neutron-absorbing cadmium control rods to regulate the chain reaction. Fermi, still mastering English, dubbed this elegantly simple machine a "pile...
...work moved to the University of Chicago when the Manhattan Project consolidated its operations there, culminating in the assembly of the first full-scale pile, CP-1, on a doubles squash court under the stands of the university football field in late 1942. Built up in layers inside wooden framing, it took the shape of a doorknob the size of a two-car garage--a flattened graphite ellipsoid 25 ft. wide and 20 ft. high, weighing nearly 100 tons. Dec. 2 dawned to below-zero cold. That morning the State Department announced that 2 million Jews had perished in Europe...
Fermi proceeded imperturbably through the experiment, confident of the estimates he had charted with his pocket slide rule. At 11:30 a.m., as was his custom, he stopped for lunch. The pile went critical in midafternoon with the full withdrawal of the control rods, and Fermi allowed himself a grin. He had proved the science of a chain reaction in uranium; from then on, building a bomb was mere engineering. He shut the pile down after 28 minutes of operation. Wigner had thought to buy a celebratory fiasco of Chianti, which supplied a toast. "For some time we had known...
From that first small pile grew production reactors that bred plutonium for the first atom bombs. Moving to Los Alamos in 1944, Fermi was on hand in the New Mexican desert for the first test of the brutal new weapon in July 1945. He estimated its explosive yield with a characteristically simple experiment, dropping scraps of paper in the predawn stillness and again when the blast wind arrived and comparing their displacement...