Word: plutonium
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...Clean" thermonuclear bombs, like clean small boys, do not necessarily stay clean for long. The most familiar kind of radioactive fallout comes from the fission of plutonium or uranium 235, and from the so-called clean bombs that the U.S. Government has announced contain only small amounts of these troublemaking substances. The bulk of the bomb's bang comes from fusion of hydrogen, which creates no fission products...
...calling in a Los Angeles high-'school science class, pursued it at the University of California (Ph.D., chemistry, 1937), became a key developer of the atomic bomb. In 1951, with Colleague Edwin M. McMillan, he won the Nobel Prize for his discovery (in 1940) of element 94 (plutonium), has since played a heavy role in finding subsequent elements (through No. 101). Although he finds little time nowadays for following football very closely (he is faculty representative to the Pacific Coast Conference), Seaborg does play golf (low 90s), swims in his backyard pool. One current project: search for the next...
Late in the afternoon, scientists at Britain's Windscale plant, the main British source of plutonium, saw danger signals on a temperature control instrument. A hurried second glance told them what had happened. One of the two nuclear reactors had been closed down all day; deep in the massive structure of graphite blocks, one or more canisters of uranium had grown red hot and burst open. Apparently the uranium, heated by its fierce radioactivity, was burning in an oldfashioned, chemical way by combining with oxygen in the air that is blown past to cool...
...knowing gadgets for every use under the sun. There are electronic elevator systems with miniature electronic brains that automatically keep track of passenger demand, electronic "Ph meters" that can test with equal ease the acidity of California's lemon juice or the radioactivity of the AEC's plutonium, electronic "stopwatches" for industrial and nuclear use that can time movement down to one-billionth of a second v. one-hundredth of a second for mechanical watches...
...screen erupted into a chaos of snaps, pings and pongs. The mousetraps were the brightest touch in a lucid, hour-long primer, mostly in cartoons, tracing the story of atomic energy from Democritus to Rickover. The title ominously suggested that the show might smack more of Pluto than plutonium, but apart from small blemishes, e.g., giving a Russian accent to the villainous genie in the illustrative fable of the genie-in-the-vessel, the lesson was straightforward, cleverly taught and free of the cuteness with which some TV educators have patronized the mass audience...