Word: plutonium
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...Businessmen in the Public Interest. Nuclear Pioneer George Weil agrees, calling the breeder concept "dangerous and unproved." Some objections focus on the use of liquid sodium (a tricky substance that explodes on contact with water and burns in air) as a cooling medium. Others concern the fuel, plutonium, the basic ingredient of the hydrogen bomb and one of the deadliest substances known. Finally, the critics wonder how to get rid of radioactive wastes from any nuclear reactor, some of which remain lethal for 500,000 years. At present, the AEC plans to store them in large concrete containers...
Ordinary reactors "burn" uranium 235, which eventually becomes stable lead. Breeders use either U-235 or man-made plutonium for fuel, but also use as a "fertile" material (a nonfissionable substance that absorbs excess neutrons freed in the chain reaction and becomes fissionable) another form of uranium called U-238. In addition to being more common than U-235, this uranium isotope, when struck by a hurtling neutron, does not break apart as does U-235. Instead, it absorbs the particle and is transmuted, by 20th century alchemy, into fissionable plutonium. Thus the breeder's fertile material is gradually...
...scientist could have more imposing credentials: Nobel laureate in chemistry, co-discoverer of plutonium and eight other synthetic elements, former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley and longtime associate director of its famed Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. Yet Glenn Seaborg is currently the center of a bitter controversy that has sharply divided the nation's largest and most powerful private scientific organization. At issue is whether the three-term chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission should also serve as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which has 130,000 members. If a scientist...
...atomic bomb; of a heart attack; in Washington, D.C. A career Army engineer, Groves was selected in 1942 to lead the crash program that eventually employed 150,000 scientists, engineers, technicians, military men and others. Three years of all-out effort culminated on July 16, 1945, in the first plutonium-bomb test at Alamogordo, N. Mex. The following month two atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the debate over nuclear morality that followed, Groves wrote in Now It Can Be Told: "The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II. While they brought death...
...could be dangerous. Rather than be outgunned and outmaneuvered eventually, Israel might carry out a pre-emptive strike that could draw Russians and perhaps Americans, too, into a Middle East war. Some observers also note that Israel, with a nuclear reactor in the Negev as a source of enriched plutonium, could build a nuclear weapon in a matter of months. Though the Israelis have vowed that they would not be the first to introduce nukes into the Middle East, would they stick to that resolve if the U.S. failed them...