Word: reactor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...founded Glendon College, which is modeled on Swarthmore. Some 16 buildings are under construction or planned at Ontario's much-respected Queen's University in Kingston. The University of Waterloo has opened with a plan of alternate semesters in class and industry. The big 13-sided nuclear reactor at McMaster University in Hamilton is getting lost in a forest of new buildings...
When space talk turns to far-out exploration, to manned voyages far beyond the moon or Mars, most plans call for a nuclear reactor capable of providing abundant power without paying too much of a penalty for weight, and an ion engine capable of turning that power into thrust for months or years without paying too high a price in fuel consumption. Last week the first of such combinations, featuring SNAP-10A,* the world's first spaceworthy reactor, went into operation as it orbited the earth...
Bomb Fuel. The very conception of a nuclear reactor that can work by itself in space required new and imaginative technology. And scientists at California's Atomics International, who built SNAP-10A for the Atomic Energy Commission, produced a machine like nothing now working on earth. Its fuel is 4.75 kilograms (10.5 lbs.) of uranium 235, the nuclear explosive used in the first atomic bomb. Packed into 37 tubes of heat-resistant nickel alloy, the fuel is mixed with zirconium hydride, which acts as a moderator, slowing down the high-energy neutrons released by fissioning atoms...
This weird and dangerous gadget, weighing 250 lbs., was gingerly set on the nose of an Air Force Atlas-Agena rocket at Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. The reflector ports were open to keep the nuclear action from starting, and a conical windscreen covered the reactor to protect it from buffeting as it climbed swiftly through dense, low-altitude...
When the rocket cleared the atmosphere, the windscreen was jettisoned; the reactor and its conical support section went into orbit 800 miles above the earth. As soon as SNAP's scientists were convinced that the proper orbit had been attained, they sent a signal that told the reflector mechanism to reduce neutron leakage. Slowly the nuclear reaction started; heat built up in the core, and a magnetic pump circulated the metallic coolant at 1020°F. through tubes in the skin of the support structure. The inner ends of 2880 pellets of a germanium-silicon material were heated while...