Word: reactors
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...would have won a long lead toward building an atom bomb. In compensation, Fermi made the most important discovery of his life, that slowing neutrons by passing them through a light-element "moderator" such as paraffin increased their effectiveness, a finding that would allow releasing nuclear energy in a reactor...
...radar and the proximity fuse, inventions of more immediate value. Fermi and his fellow emigres--Hungarians Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann and Edward Teller, German Hans Bethe--formed the heart of the bomb squad. In 1939, still officially enemy aliens, Fermi and Szilard co-invented the nuclear reactor at Columbia University, sketching out a three-dimensional lattice of uranium slugs dropped into holes in black, greasy blocks of graphite moderator, with sliding neutron-absorbing cadmium control rods to regulate the chain reaction. Fermi, still mastering English, dubbed this elegantly simple machine a "pile...
Producing energy through nuclear fusion is easy enough to do--provided you have a reactor that can generate temperatures hotter than the sun's. If you could somehow achieve fusion at room temperature, you'd have an unlimited source of power that could retire petroleum, nuclear and solar energy for good...
...chemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced to great fanfare that they had done just that, building a bench-top fusion percolator made up of two electrodes and a slug of heavy water. But Pons and Fleischmann were vague about how their "cold fusion" reactor worked, and when other scientists tried to duplicate the pair's results, they got mostly cold water for their trouble...
...explosion at an aging nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Ukraine, releases radiation into the atmosphere...