Word: plutonium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...megawatt reactor and, to keep it going at full blast, 100 tons of uranium ore (which is now in oversupply throughout the world and may in time be available on the open market). This would assure the aspiring nuclear power a yearly output of some 20 kilograms of plutonium, the raw material for bombs, which reactors produce automatically as a byproduct of peaceful operation. The final bridge between a nation's peaceful and military programs is a chemical or gaseous diffusion plant (construction time: two years) to turn the raw plutonium into weapons-grade material...
...conference last week, Premier Shastri confirmed his support for Hindi, and as for bureaucratic snafus, he said simply, "There will have to be some waste of time." With that, Shastri flew off to Bombay to participate in the dedication of India's first factory for the manufacture of plutonium-for which there is no Hindi word...
...only potential obstacle is an Indian pledge to Canada that reactor products-notably the plutonium needed for nuclear weaponry-would be used solely for peaceful purposes...
...sure whether the low power was intentional, to save precious fissionable material, or a result of poor design and construction. Radioactive particles collected by high-flying airplanes may soon provide an answer, however, for the particles prattle all sorts of secrets: whether the fissionable material used was plutonium or U-235; how much of it was wasted; whether an attempt was made to get fusion (hydrogen bomb) action...
...first, U.S. avithorities seemed to agree that the Chinese must have used plutonium as their fissionable material. The process of separating U-235 from natural uranium requires enormous amounts of electric power, and China is power poor. Plutonium, on the other hand, is made in nuclear reactors, which require little external power. China is known to have reactors, and both air surveyance and ground spying have reported a large reactor complex near Paotow in Inner Mongolia. Japanese students of Chinese activities also agreed that China must have used plutonium because it lacked the electricity needed for the production...