Word: reactor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...continuing nightmare of the atomic age is the possibility that somewhere, some time, a nuclear reactor may go out of control and blow itself to bits like an overheated steam-age boiler with its safety valve tied down. Builders and promoters of reactors insist that this is highly improbable, but the Atomic Energy Commission wants more facts - just in case. So last week it loosed the controls of a reactor and let her blow...
...reactor was a Kiwi, an obsolete experimental nuclear rocket engine built at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and used only for brief tests. It was set on an expendable railroad car on Nevada's desolate Jackass Flats and surrounded with a motley array of test objects-nuclear fuels, explosives, radiation detectors, air samplers. A stout steel net was hung to catch any flying debris, and the scientists retired to the control building two miles from the condemned power plant to wait for a northeast wind that would carry any radioactive fallout away from Nevada's inhabited areas...
Poison for Toads. The reactor itself was completely gone, its graphite moderator and several hundred pounds of uranium fuel turned to vapor by temperatures above 8,000°F., roughly the same as the surface of the sun. For a fraction of a second before it evaporated, the reactor had generated millions of times as much energy as Hoover...
India's scientists, who think differently, are confident that they can explode a nuclear device within 18 months. A Canadian-built reactor is in operation near Bombay, another is under construction, a third is on order...
...only potential obstacle is an Indian pledge to Canada that reactor products-notably the plutonium needed for nuclear weaponry-would be used solely for peaceful purposes...