Word: reactor
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...minimize the amount of oxygen necessary to maintain the two-gas atmosphere (44% oxygen, 56% nitrogen) that the student crew breathes, the simulated spacecraft is equipped with a concentrator that pulls exhaled carbon dioxide out of the air. The carbon dioxide is combined in a catalytic reactor with hydrogen and converted into water and methane. An electrolysis system then decomposes the water into oxygen-for breathing-and hydrogen that is used to feed the catalyti c reactor. Reluctant to waste even the squeal of this chemical pig, McDonnell Doug las engineers are working on spacecraft thrusters that can be powered...
...lack of governmental support was the basic cause of the Nazis' nuclear failure. But some of his anecdotes suggest that the German scientists themselves were at fault. After Physicist Walther Bothe calculated that graphite would not be an effective "moderator"-the material that slows down neutrons in a reactor-no German scientist thought to question him. Instead, the Germans turned to heavy water for a moderator. However, they were hamstrung for the remainder of the war when an Allied sabotage team crippled the world's only heavy-water plant, at Vemork in occupied Norway. Meanwhile, Enrico Fermi...
...apiece to finance three years' research into the perfection of "atomic fingerprinting" for old masters at Pittsburgh's Mellon Institute. The technique, originally developed by Dutch scientists, consists of taking flecks of paint from genuine Rembrandts and Vermeers, then bombarding them with neutrons in a reactor in order to measure their exact chemical impurities. In time, the Mellon Institute hopes to compile a library of chemical analyses of the different types of paint used by a dozen famous artists-or at least the type of paint used in the country and period of each...
...NUCLEAR SHIPS. McNamara adopted a go-slow approach, for which he was upbraided last week by the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy. The Committee urged the allocation of funds for a new submarine reactor proposed by Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover and the building of more nuclear surface ships...
Tests of the device, conducted at the bureau's Bartlesville, Okla., petroleum research center, will continue through July. Thus far, they have demonstrated that the reactor can cut automotive hydrocarbon exhaust to less than 70 parts per million, compared with an average of 900 p. p.m. in exhaust from cars unequipped with pollution-control units. Carbon monoxide has been reduced to less than .7% of the total exhaust from a car equipped with the reactor. Both figures are well within the 1970 standards proposed last week. Nonetheless, said one Du Pont official, the unit is far from commercially feasible...