Word: reactor
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...report, AEC urged heavier stress on development of "breeder" reactors, which will create more nuclear fuel than they consume. Present-model nuclear reactors operate through fission of scarce and costly uranium 235. Natural uranium is mostly U-238; less than 1% of it is U-235. Breeder reactors would convert nonfissionable U-238 into fissionable plutonium, or convert the fairly common element thorium into fissionable U-233 (neither plutonium nor U-233 is found in nature). A few days before the 20th anniversary of the first chain reaction, AEC announced that its experimental plutonium reactor had achieved a self-sustaining...
...first built has been abandoned; U.S. authorities no longer feel driven to solve the enormously difficult design problems of a nuclear-powered aircraft. But the Pratt & Whitney engineers who sweated over the complexities of the atom plane's engine are still determined to get some sort of nuclear reactor aloft. They are working for AEC now, and last week the commission allowed them to give a glimpse of their top-secret labs...
White-Hot Metal. The most striking Middletown project is SNAP-50, a lightweight nuclear-power reactor designed to operate in space. Incorporating technical know-how gained on the airplane-engine project, this SNAP (for Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power) contains liquid lithium and gaseous potassium, tricky fluids that would drive most engine designers to seek liquid solace. Molten lithium is frightening stuff; it corrodes almost anything, and bursts into flame on contact with oxygen. Gaseous potassium, while not quite so bad, is hot and explosive...
...liquid lithium flows through the hot reactor core and emerges at 2,000° F. The tubes that carry it, made of zirconium-columbium alloy, run at near white heat. The lithium is piped through a heat exchanger and turns liquid potassium (boiling point, 1,400° F.) to high-pressure gas that runs a turbine producing 300 kw. to 1,000 kw. of electricity. The potassium gas goes to a wide, flat condenser to be turned back into a liquid (see diagram...
Aerojet scientists mixed liquid ammonia (NH3) with powdered uranium oxide, sealed the mixture in a capsule and stuck the capsule in a nuclear reactor at Livermore Laboratory. When neutrons from the reactor hit uranium atoms in the capsule, they caused the atoms to fission, or split. The atomic fragments shot apart with enormous energy (200 million electron volts per fission), splintering ammonia molecules and knocking them in every direction. The fragments recombined at once. Some formed gaseous hydrogen (H2) or nitrogen (N2). But about half the ammonia that reacted formed the much-desired hydrazine (N2H4...