Word: reactor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Citation: "Deviser of the nuclear reactor that led to the first undersea vessel powered by nuclear energy, you have enabled men for the first time to go down into the sea in ships wholly independent of the atmosphere...
Physicists last week were watching with interest a complicated apparatus parked near a nuclear reactor at Hanford, Wash. Out of it may come a new branch of physics-or a warning that the structure of physics is threatened with collapse...
...particle with less than one two-thousandth of the mass of an electron. It has no electric charge, and it therefore reacts very slightly with matter, sailing through solid metal or rock almost as if they were empty space. About 5% of the energy of a nuclear reactor (so says the theory) goes off in the form of neutrinos, and most of those that shoot downward pass right through the earth...
Taking this ponderous instrument to Hanford, they set it in front of one of the great reactors and surrounded it with a massive lead shield to reduce background radiation from cosmic rays, etc. By commandeering all the lead shielding available at Hanford, they got the background count for pairs of flashes down to 2.15 a minute when the reactor was not operating. When the reactor went to work, releasing floods of neutrinos (if they exist), the count went up to 2.5 a minute...
...disadvantage of tritium is that it does not exist in nature. It has to be made at fantastic cost in nuclear reactors. Optimistic physicists hoped that a small priming of tritium would ignite large amounts of light elements that are not so hard to come by. Pessimists feared that too much tritium would be required. They pointed out that each atom of tritium manufactured in a nuclear reactor costs about one atom of U-235 or plutonium, which could be used to better advantage, they thought, in old-style fission bombs...