Word: reactor
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Before making up its mind on the third-reactor issue, the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy held extensive closed-door hearings. A special panel of four outside experts, including onetime AEChairman Gordon Dean, unanimously concluded that "present and planned output of reactor products is substantially inadequate to meet the minimum future needs of the armed services," and a parade of witnesses agreed...
Convinced, the 18-member Joint Committee unanimously voted out a $145 million authorization for a third plutonium reactor, to be built near the 14-year-old veteran at Hanford. Last week, in the teeth of President Eisenhower's letter declaring that "there can be no justifiable basis to proceed" until the Administration decides that the third reactor is needed, both the House and the Senate lopsidedly approved the Joint Committee's bill...
...members considered the evidence so overwhelming that they found the Administration stand "a great mystery," as Washington's Democratic Senator Henry M. ("Scoop") Jackson put it. Actually, there was no mystery: faced with an embarrassingly huge deficit in fiscal 1959, the Budget Bureau wanted to postpone a third reactor until the need was unmistakably obvious...
Light Molecules. The simplest kind of atomic engine uses a nuclear reactor to heat a gaseous propellant and shoot it out of a nozzle. Its chief advantage over chemical rocket engines: its propellant can be liquid hydrogen, whose molecules are light and therefore move faster at a given temperature. The best possible chemical combination (hydrogen and ozone), burning at 5,000° F. and 500 lbs.-per-sq.-in. chamber pressure, gives an exhaust velocity of 13,000 ft. per sec. A nuclear rocket, using hydrogen at the same pressure and only 3,000° F., shoots...
...worst problem will be the reactor itself. The core will have to be small, probably a cylinder a few feet in diameter, but it will have to generate something like 100 times the energy of the massive reactor of Britain's Calder Hall nuclear power station. This means that it will run very hot, and will be kept from flashing into vapor only by the stream of liquid hydrogen forced rapidly through it. On the other hand, the core need work for only a few minutes. By that time the propellant will have been exhausted, and the rocket will...