Word: plutonium
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What did the Russians need to do? The Smyth Report told them (as their own scientists could have told them anyway) that there are two roads to the release of explosive atomic energy. One is separating explosive uranium 235 from natural uranium. The other is transmuting uranium into explosive plutonium in a chain-reacting pile. The U.S. has used and is still using both methods successfully...
...Plutonium is trickier. It is made in a pile consisting of natural uranium (mostly U-238) rods imbedded in super-pure graphite. When everything is just right, a chain reaction starts. Plutonium can be separated from _ uranium by comparatively simple chemical refining. But the piles themselves are not simple. If they don't work just right, they don't work...
...Meaning of Security. The whole process of emergency clearances, Lilienthal went on, had been specifically authorized by law to speed AEC's work. A breakdown of plutonium production was threatened in the overworked Hanford, Wash. plant, for example, and it had been necessary to rush in a corps of workers to expand the plant. "To lose 60 or 90 days [through loyalty checks] at that juncture," said Lilienthal, "was a very serious responsibility for the commission...
...Institute, financed by the establishment of a memorial to the Aaron Daniel and Bertha Hertz family of Cleveland, Ohio, will be the first privately endowed organization to receive regularly a clinical supply of radioactive iodine and radioactive phosphorous, by-products of the uranium piles which produce plutonium for use in atomic bombs. This method of production is relatively cheap, since the only alternative means is cyclotron bombardment which produces such small quantities as to be impractical for the desired scale of operation...
Research like this was handy early in the war, when only a millionth of a gram of plutonium was available for study...