Word: plutonium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...work on its 192,323-acre site, even though two of Savannah River's five reactors are shut down permanently, and the others are not allowed to run at full power in part because of deficiencies in their emergency cooling systems. Still, the plant is the sole supplier of plutonium and tritium, the flint and steel of nuclear warheads. While the nation probably has all the plutonium it needs, tritium, which enhances plutonium's yield, has a half-life of twelve years and must be continuously produced to maintain the nation's nuclear stockpile...
...moved around by shrimp and other creatures that dig into the bottom and spread the substances through digestion and excretion. Though ocean sediment generally accumulates at a rate of about one-half inch - per thousand years, Biogeochemist John Farrington of the University of Massachusetts at Boston cites discoveries of plutonium from thermonuclear test blasts in the 1950s and 1960s located 12 in. to 20 in. deep in ocean sediment. Thus contaminants can conceivably lie undisturbed in the oceans indefinitely -- or resurface at any time...
...with "Too schematic . . . most of us think and feel." Ground Zero is the proof. It is a tragicomic tour through Manhattan's homosexual nighttown: the gay bathhouses, pornographic theaters and bars that the author cruised a decade ago. He finds the atmosphere radioactive with fear; sperm reminds him of plutonium. In this subdued climate, Holleran finds new enjoyment with his surviving gay companions. He meets many over freshly dug graves and notes the difference in his friends, "as if someone went from adolescence to late middle age without the intervening gradations...
...from nuclear scandal. Last week the Norwegian Foreign Ministry confirmed that some 15 tons of the country's heavy water was diverted in 1983 to an unknown destination. Prized for its purity, Norwegian heavy water, or deuterium oxide, is used as a coolant in nuclear reactors and to produce plutonium, an ingredient in nuclear bombs...
...turned inside out, merged to a common inward-driving sphere; the spherical detonation wave crossed into the second shell of solid fast Composition B and accelerated; hit the wall of dense uranium tamper and became a shock wave and squeezed, liquefying, moving through; hit the nickel plating of the plutonium core and squeezed, the small sphere shrinking, collapsing into itself, becoming an eyeball...