Word: reactor
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...week was an international spy quintet that, the prosecution charged, was caught attempting to pass on to "a potential enemy ... a picture of our current antisubmarine effort and research," as well as details of Britain's first nuclear submarine, the Dreadnought, which is fitted with a U.S.-designed reactor power plant...
...shut down for overhaul for two weeks. It was equipped with every built-in safeguard, every "fail safe" device known to science. What went wrong with SL-1? Although technicians could stay in the building for only brief periods, everything they saw suggested that the impossible had happened: the reactor had suddenly boiled up in a runaway atomic reaction. In thousandths of a second, its water coolant had been turned into superheated steam that ruptured the reactor tank. Best guess was that some of the cadmium control rods (which are inserted to stop the nuclear reaction) had somehow been lifted...
Early in the subzero night, alarms flashed in three fire stations dotted across the lonely Idaho Falls test site of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Fire crews raced toward the gloomy silo housing the experimental nuclear reactor that the Army calls SL-1 (Stationary Low No. 1), suddenly ground to a halt at the silo door when their detection equipment registered lethal radiation. Lead-suited rescue workers took over, but inside the reactor room radiation was up to 1,000 roentgens an hour (450 is a man-killing dose). They could stay inside for just a few moments...
...news that buzzed through Washington last week marked another awesome milestone in the onrush of the atomic age. The confirmed facts: in the drab wastes of the Negev desert, tiny, semi-industrialized Israel, with the help of France, is building a 24,000-kw. nuclear reactor with the capacity to produce plutonium, a key ingredient for both a fission and hydrogen bomb. By 1964, estimated some U.S. atom experts, Israel could in theory set off a killingly effective atomic blast...
...nation of any size with brains and money can now set itself up in the atomic business. And it can be done in relative secrecy. Though one of 40 nations with whom the U.S. shares information on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, Israel had not mentioned the reactor to U.S. embassy officials in Tel Aviv, who were led to believe that the Negev construction was for a textile plant. About a month ago U.S. intelligence sources got pictures of the plant-and it was suddenly clear what Israel was up to (the installation was also distantly visible from...