Word: reactor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...French physicians, led by Dr. Georges Mathé, got the idea from the emergency treatment improvised in 1958 for victims of a reactor accident in Yugoslavia-five nuclear scientists who got what would ordinarily have been a fatal overdose of radiation. Four were pulled through and are still doing well, thanks to injections of bone marrow. The radiation that almost killed the patients had made them able to accept other people's marrow cells, instead of rejecting them through nature's familiar "immune reaction...
Adams' crust piercer, which he patented and assigned to the AEC, is a high-temperature nuclear reactor designed to melt its way into rock. The reactor is 2 ft. to 3 ft. in diameter, and its active material (uranium oxide) is enclosed in a cylinder of beryllium oxide, which serves as a heat insulator. The lower point, mostly tungsten, is heavy, while the upper point, mostly beryllium, is light...
Puddle of Lava. The "Needle Reactor," as Adams calls it, will be placed in a shallow shaft before its nuclear reactor is allowed to go critical. Quickly the temperature will rise to about 1,100° C. (2,012° F.), which is hot enough to melt most rock. Because of the insulation around the midsection, most of the heat will flow downward; soon the lower point will be surrounded by a puddle of lava. The needle reactor will gradually drop into this plastic stuff, and the lava will close over it and solidify...
...reactor will sink toward the center of the earth, moving in a bubble of molten rock. Pressure on its sides will rise enormously, but Adams is not afraid that it will be crushed; it will have no inner cavities to collapse. He figures it can penetrate about 20 miles before pressure and temperature get too high for its comfort. Then it will automatically start to rise...
Adams estimates that a needle reactor will need about three months to drop 20 miles. He thinks the best place for a trial run would be one of the rock salt domes that poke to the surface along the Gulf of Mexico shore; the needle reactor should bubble through them as carelessly as a skindiver. Later models can tackle the sterner granite and basalt that form most of the rest of the earth's crust...