Word: plutonium
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Atom-powered ships might sail a million miles on a single fuel charge of uranium or plutonium; the prospect was most promising, said General Electric's Vice President Harry A. Winne last week. But atomic power for public utilities, he thought, was not quite so promising. To compete with soft coal at $4 a ton, "fissionable material" would have to sell at $6,000 a pound...
Last week General Electric completed a dicker to take over, from Du Pont, the management of the $347,000,000 Government-owned plant at Hanford, Wash. Although the three great piles in the Hanford desert were built to produce plutonium for bombs, their byproduct is unharnessed energy in enormous quantities. G.E. will run the piles at cost plus $1. Its profit will be in priceless experience...
Apparently Dr. Slotin and seven or more other scientists were working with "subcritical masses" of uranium or plutonium. Kept apart, these masses were lifeless as lead, but if brought together to form a mass above "critical" size, a chain reaction would start. Its violence would depend on the character of the materials. Probably they were midway in activity between mild-mannered natural uranium and furious plutonium...
Radiant Death. One of them, radioactive poisons, was mentioned briefly and guardedly in the Smyth Report. Wrote Professor Smyth: ". . . The fission products produced in one day's run of a 100,000 kw. chain-reacting pile might be sufficient to make a large area uninhabitable." The three plutonium piles at Richland, Wash. are enormously more powerful. If Professor Smyth's estimate was right, each pile has been producing, every day for more than a year, enough radioactive poisons to depopulate many "large areas...
...science these days. Its latest interest is cosmic rays. One reason: the rocket weapons of World War III may shoot through empty space above the atmosphere, where cosmic rays are loose. Another: cosmic rays may some day supply the key to a "super" atomic bomb, which will make the plutonium efforts look like firecrackers...