Word: pilings
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Squash Court Pile. Production of plutonium was probably no more important, but vastly more dramatic. On a squash court under the stands of University of Chicago's football field, a strange apparatus took form. It was an oblate spheroid (doorknob shape), built up of graphite bricks with lumps of uranium or uranium oxide imbedded in their corners. This was the world's first chain reaction "pile"-a uranium "lattice" and a graphite "moderator." If it worked according to Dr. Fermi's theories, it would produce the first chain reaction ever set up on earth...
This momentous experiment-the very first chain reaction-marked the beginning of the Atomic Age. The pile was successful. Long before the queasy process had been reduced to an orderly procedure, a gigantic, full-sized plutonium plant had been started at Hanford on the desert near Yakima, Wash. Advantages of the unattractive site: isolation, a good supply of Grand Coulee power and the Columbia River which would carry away the enormous heat generated in the piles...
City of Pluto. The original pile at Chicago had been a ticklish business, but the giant piles at Hanford were studies in unexplored dangers. Theory warned that as soon as they started working, they would generate floods of deadly radiation and produce unknown radioactive elements, most of them fiendishly poisonous: These effects could conceivably be so powerful and so long-lasting that no living thing could approach a pile which had once been in operation...
Energy & Poisons. Besides plutonium, the Hanford plant produced two frightening by-product effects. The water which cooled the piles carried off enough energy, derived from the chain reaction, to heat the Columbia River appreciably. No definite figures have been released, but the hints in Dr. Smyth's report are portentous. Some relative of the uranium pile may still prove a power source great enough to run all the world's machines...
...caught and hanged. His 19-year-old sister lost her mind at the news. For the next 25 years, until her death, she called at the bank daily to inquire for her brother. In legend, she became the "bank nun." Until 1924, the bank occupied a low, fortress-like pile dominating London's City, was known as The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. (Despite its ponderous look, a workman once found his way from the street through building cracks and into the bullion room.) It withstood the bombs of the Luftwaffe...