Word: reactors
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When space talk turns to far-out exploration, to manned voyages far beyond the moon or Mars, most plans call for a nuclear reactor capable of providing abundant power without paying too much of a penalty for weight, and an ion engine capable of turning that power into thrust for months or years without paying too high a price in fuel consumption. Last week the first of such combinations, featuring SNAP-10A,* the world's first spaceworthy reactor, went into operation as it orbited the earth...
Bomb Fuel. The very conception of a nuclear reactor that can work by itself in space required new and imaginative technology. And scientists at California's Atomics International, who built SNAP-10A for the Atomic Energy Commission, produced a machine like nothing now working on earth. Its fuel is 4.75 kilograms (10.5 lbs.) of uranium 235, the nuclear explosive used in the first atomic bomb. Packed into 37 tubes of heat-resistant nickel alloy, the fuel is mixed with zirconium hydride, which acts as a moderator, slowing down the high-energy neutrons released by fissioning atoms...
...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...