Word: plutonium
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...fissionable (explosive) but not so radioactive that it would disintegrate before the big bang was touched off. The bomb builders found what they wanted at the University of California's famed Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, where Drs. Glenn Seaborg and Edwin McMillan had put together some synthetic plutonium, element 94. Until then, plutonium was no more than a lab curiosity, but it proved to be properly fissionable, and it was so slightly radioactive that only half of it would disintegrate in 24,100 years...
Today, element 103 and its short-lived relatives are of interest only to theoretical physicists. They have no known practical value-but neither did plutonium when it was first manufactured at Berkeley more than 20 years...
LARGEST ATOMIC POWER output in the world is planned by Administration for Government plant at Hanford, Wash. Under Eisenhower, Congress authorized $145 million to build the plant to produce plutonium. Kennedy will ask for an extra $95 million to expand the plant to produce 700,000 kilowatts of electricity, more than Bonneville Dam, may sell it through dam authority...
Lanky, roughhewn Glenn Seaborg has more qualifications for running the AEC than mere desire. He is a top-rank nuclear scientist. He was a co-discoverer of the element plutonium, crucial in the development of the atom bomb. That achievement won him a 1951 Nobel Prize. His work in the laboratory has been continuously fruitful. Asked what he does, he answers with calculated simplicity: "I discover elements." To date he has been instrumental in adding nine more to the periodic table...
...hurdle for any nation is to get weapons-grade nuclear material," said Gore. "Once that is done, either as the product or byproduct of a nuclear plant, the nation has acquired a nuclear capability and can set off explosions." For the moment, plutonium is expensive and hard to make. But uranium is now a glut on world markets; with the expected development of a new, cheap German method of getting fissionable material by centrifuge (TIME, Oct. 24), the cost of a nuclear blast can be scaled down to the poor nation's level. Says Physicist Herman Kahn: "With...