Word: potassium
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White-Hot Metal. The most striking Middletown project is SNAP-50, a lightweight nuclear-power reactor designed to operate in space. Incorporating technical know-how gained on the airplane-engine project, this SNAP (for Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power) contains liquid lithium and gaseous potassium, tricky fluids that would drive most engine designers to seek liquid solace. Molten lithium is frightening stuff; it corrodes almost anything, and bursts into flame on contact with oxygen. Gaseous potassium, while not quite so bad, is hot and explosive...
...liquid lithium flows through the hot reactor core and emerges at 2,000° F. The tubes that carry it, made of zirconium-columbium alloy, run at near white heat. The lithium is piped through a heat exchanger and turns liquid potassium (boiling point, 1,400° F.) to high-pressure gas that runs a turbine producing 300 kw. to 1,000 kw. of electricity. The potassium gas goes to a wide, flat condenser to be turned back into a liquid (see diagram...
...heat from the condenser. There is no air to cool it by convection; the only cooling comes from radiation, which increases sharply with temperature. If the working fluid were steam, an enormous condenser would be needed to radiate its low-grade heat. The lithium-potassium combination runs so hot that a fairly small condenser does...
...Avco does the job by preheating the incoming air that eventually becomes plasma, adding extra oxygen to it, and burning oil with it in a chamber that looks like a rocket engine. This produces a flame with a temperature of 5,300° F. Spiked with a little powdered potassium carbonate to increase the ionization, the flaming stream of gas shoots between the poles of a magnet at 3,000 to 4,000 ft. per second, about three times the speed of sound at ordinary temperatures. The plasma cools down considerably as it flows, and a good part...
...anti-Red emigrés in Munich. The reason why the deaths had not attracted special attention-one was put down as a heart attack, the other as suicide-proved bizarre. His weapon, said Stashinsky, had been a single-barreled aluminum air gun that fired a pellet of liquid potassium cyanide through a fine mesh screen, releasing a poison spray. The poison caused death within 90 seconds after it was inhaled, leaving no mark on the victims...