Word: plutonium
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...billion. Even so, the plant will operate at barely 40% of capacity until state regulators grant certification. "Radioactive wastes will be a lot safer here than sitting around at old bomb plants," said ROBERT NEILL, director of the Environmental Evaluation Group, a watchdog organization. The debris, mostly plutonium-tainted clothing, tools and sludge, will be lowered a distance equal to the height of two World Trade Centers into a rock tomb hollowed from a salt formation. Gradually the walls will collapse, burying the refuse snugly, the EPA hopes, for 10,000 years. That's less than the radioactive half-life...
From that first small pile grew production reactors that bred plutonium for the first atom bombs. Moving to Los Alamos in 1944, Fermi was on hand in the New Mexican desert for the first test of the brutal new weapon in July 1945. He estimated its explosive yield with a characteristically simple experiment, dropping scraps of paper in the predawn stillness and again when the blast wind arrived and comparing their displacement...
DIED. GLENN SEABORG, 86, former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and Nobel prizewinner; in Lafayette, Calif. Seaborg began his career in the 1930s in Berkeley. He led the research team that discovered plutonium and was the first living person to have an element, seaborgium, named for him. After helping build the Bomb on the Manhattan Project, Seaborg championed the peaceful use of atomic energy...
...junk bonds; this time it's derivatives. Buying a derivative is taking a bet -- called an option -- on the price of a stock at some future point. The plutonium of the financial world, derivatives are complex financial instruments that, in steady economic times, can churn out megatons of money for investors. Bet badly, though, and you get a meltdown. When Long-Term Capital Management, a high-risk, high-rolling hedge fund based on the formulas of two derivatives Nobelists, went belly-up last month, Greenspan realized that the damage wasn't restricted to the brandy-and-cigars crowd. Banks...
...reform -- most of it preached to the economists who don't need it, rather than the politicians who do -- the only real action taken by President Clinton during his two-day summit in Moscow was this: He and Yeltsin agreed to slash their nuclear stockpiles by 50 tons of plutonium each, and to share sensitive information on each other's missile launches. Arms control and early warning systems may not seem so relevant at a time like this, and 50 tons represents barely a quarter of Russia's plutonium stockpile. Even so, it is a telling sign of the deepening...