Word: pilings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Then one day Jane was cleaning house in their Ritz Tower apartment when she ran across a pile of old Easy Aces transcriptions. With his race-track sense of a good thing, Goodie arranged with Ziv transcription agency (TIME, April 28) to farm out the old records to hundreds of independent stations. The canned Easy Aces is now heard by a bigger audience than ever listened to it as a live show and nets the Aces an easy $75,000 a year...
Essentially, the tame bomb is a "pile" like the original uranium pile at the University of Chicago. But uranium needs slow-moving neutrons to make its atoms split. Thus, a uranium pile is made up of small rods of uranium embedded in a large mass of graphite. Plutonium is different: its atoms can be split by fast neutrons. So a pile made of plutonium needs no graphite or other "moderator." The "Nagasaki model" atom bomb is a plutonium pile that reacts so quickly that it blows itself (and the neighborhood) to bits in millionths of a second...
...bomb-tamers of Los Alamos had a ticklish assignment: to make their bomb explode, but gently, in slow motion. How they solved the problem has not been fully explained. Uranium piles are kept from reacting too fast by inserting cadmium rods into the graphite. The rods absorb neutrons and check the action. The more cadmium, the slower the pile percolates. Some similar method may be controlling the tame plutonium...
...plutonium pile has been used only for research, where it has been extremely useful: "The fast reactor gives a more intense source of fast neutrons than physicists heretofore have been able to obtain, except during the brief time of the test of the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert...
...Britain's first pile, at Harwell near Oxford, began operation last week. Officially it is a "gleep" (graphite low energy experimental pile...