Word: reactors
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...futuristic coveralls, Rear Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, who bulled through the first atom-powered submarine over strong Navy opposition, and TV Newsman Edward R. Murrow (TIME, Sept. 30) stood on a bridge spanning a big uranium power reactor in Shippingport, Pa. (see BUSINESS), which will soon start operation and become a nuclear hero on a Murrow show next week...
...little (pop. 600) town of Shippingport, Pa. this week, a man in a white protective suit will step alone into the spotless puzzle box of the world's most powerful atomic reactor. After he shuts twelve one-ton doors and gives the final signal, giant control rods will lift slowly out of the uranium reactor core to start a sustained chain reaction. At the moment the reactor "goes critical," a flow of 508° F. water will pass through the core chamber, starting a nuclear process that eventually will produce steam to generate electric power. After three years...
Shippingport will be the first U.S. reactor to produce commercially on more than an experimental scale. When full power capacity of 60,000 to 100,000 kw. is reached around the first of the year, it should supply customers of the Duquesne Light Co. with enough electricity to light between 100,000 and 167,000 homes. It will still not be commercially competitive...
...commonest kind of radioisotope is any element (gold, cobalt, strontium) that has been placed inside a reactor long enough to become radioactive, i.e., to shoot off alpha, beta or gamma rays. Then, when these rays hit another object, their speed or intensity changes; by using Geiger counters and other devices to detect the rays, technicians can learn many filings' about the objects under bombardment. And when isotopes are added to liquids, their flow can easily be followed by Geiger counters...
...more basic problem is that the commercial market is far too small to support the many companies that have bounded into it. While six big companies supply almost all the equipment for the $1.5 billion-a-year conventional power market, 50 to 60 firms plan to make reactor equipment. AEC expects few of them to survive. Said the commission's Reactor Development Director W. Kenneth Davis: "During the next few years the business will not support 50 companies or even a fraction of them. We could have a few good companies or a lot of mediocre or bad ones...