Word: plutonium
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Although the U.S. doesn't fuel its spy satellites with nuclear reactors, we have sent up more than 20 spacecraft powered by plutonium. One of these had an accident in 1965 from which we received two-thirds of all the plutonium-238 in our atmosphere today. About 20 percent of all nuclearpowered spacecraft sent up by the U.S. and Soviet Union have broken down in some...
...nuclear weapons network, which had long been overseen by the now defunct Atomic Energy Commission, and finally < seems bent on reform. Information about the weapons-production system has emerged that only begins to suggest the past callousness of both Government officials and private contractors. At the sprawling Hanford plutonium- processing complex in Washington State, managers once deliberately released 5,050 curies of radioactive iodine into the air. The reason: to see if they could reduce the amount of time uranium must be cooled before being processed into plutonium, presumably to increase production...
...reactors have been deactivated and the remaining one is on indefinite standby; the Savannah River complex, where all three operational reactors are down, knocking out the only means of producing tritium, a hydrogen isotope that boosts the explosive power of nearly all the 22,000 U.S. nuclear warheads; the plutonium-processing plant at Rocky Flats near Boulder, Colo.; and the deceptively named Feed Materials Production Center, in Fernald, Ohio, where some workers are striking for higher wages and safer conditions...
...days of nuclear weaponry. Besides the partial melting of a fuel rod in 1970, a more recent near calamity took place in March 1982, when a technician at one of the Savannah River reactors left a water valve open, and for twelve hours the undetected flow flooded a large plutonium-processing room. The contaminated water was 2 ft. deep...
...House last week, President Reagan and Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci asked Department of Energy Secretary John Herrington to answer one question: Is the nation's nuclear stockpile in jeopardy? There was ample reason for their concern. A few days earlier, Building 771 at the Government's Rocky Flats plutonium-processing plant in Colorado became the second weapons facility to be shut down in less than two months, after three people were exposed to radioactive material. Simultaneously, a Government report charged DOE-run weapons-research labs with lax security during visits by foreign experts, including some from Soviet bloc countries...