Word: plutonium
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...atomic power was still infested with "bugs," the worst of which were the deadly rays given off by piles and their byproducts. It hinted that smaller, handier piles might eventually be designed. What it did not state was that many physicists consider Hanford-type piles already obsolete except for plutonium production...
Several approaches were guessable. A small plutonium pile might serve as a source of heat to drive some conventional engine, using steam or other fluid as a heat-transfer agent. More radical, and probably more interesting to imaginative technicians, would be a motor using atomic energy direct. This would be possible if "fissionable material" could be made to "explode slowly" like the propellent material in a bazooka projectile. The products of the slow explosion would have to stream out in one direction, giving a powerful, sustained push in the opposite direction. The obstacles blocking either approach were admittedly enormous. "Even...
...press, eager but uneasy, got its first look last week at a uranium pile in operation. The occasion: the sale at Oak Ridge of a pile-made radioactive isotope, produced as a peaceful by-product of atom bomb plutonium...
Assuming that the power source is uranium or plutonium, such an engine would require: 1) a chain-reacting pile of several tons (which would provide energy in the form of heat); 2) boilers and other equipment for converting the pile's heat into steam; 3) massive shields to protect crews from the pile's deadly radiation; 4) a conventional turbine...
Footprints in Steel. All this and much more, still to be disclosed, had been wrought by a bomb of the same plutonium type as that used at Nagasaki, but less powerful. As it was, these proud vessels had been humbled...