Word: plutonium
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...running his own research laboratory when Monsanto bought it in 1936, took him along as research boss. During World War II he bossed the purification of plutonium, from 1945 to 1948 ran the Oak Ridge project, is now a Government adviser on top-secret scientific matters. For Monsanto, seventh biggest...
...Russians still had one major gap in their knowledge: they did not know how to make plutonium. That gap, the committee suggested, was filled by Bruno Pontecorvo, the Italian-born British physicist who quietly took his wife and three children on a trip to Finland last fall, then vanished behind the Iron Curtain. Pontecorvo was an expert on nuclear reactors, the devices which are needed to make plutonium...
...Canada's Chalk River atomic center, Pontecorvo helped design the heavy-water pile, still the "reactor of most advanced design and performance." He knew the secrets of the plutonium-producing piles at Hanford. After the war, he was a senior officer at Harwell, the British atomic research center. Pontecorvo, whose brother and sister were lifelong Communists, might have been betraying reactor data from 1943 on, the committee guessed. He was rated by some colleagues as an even abler scientist than Fuchs. After Fuchs, said the committee, "Pontecorvo may be plausibly rated as the second deadliest betrayer . . . Certain...
...point that aroused most suspicion was the mention of "temperatures of millions of degrees." The center of an exploding atomic bomb is even hotter than that, but Richter said he used no uranium, or plutonium made from uranium-the only known means of heating appreciable quantities of matter on earth to a temperature of millions of degrees. And even if that temperature were reached, it would quickly vaporize the walls of any container. So, reasoned U.S. physicists, Richter was probably mistaken on that pivotal point...
...Cheese & Fruit. When plutonium is made from uranium in a nuclear reactor, the U-235 that is sacrificed splits into other elements of lesser atomic weight. Most of these are fiercely radioactive, and they must be disposed of before the plutonium can be used for atomic bombs. The chemical separation process, accomplished by remote control from behind thick shields, results in a crude mixture of fission products and nonradioactive chemicals. Radioactivity of the mixture varies, but may be as high as 1,000 curies* per lb.-about twice as active as radium, the smallest visible speck of which is dangerous...