Word: reactors
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...19th century was the century of chemistry, the 20th was the century of physics. The burgeoning science supported such transforming applications as medical imaging, nuclear reactors, atom and hydrogen bombs, radio and television, transistors, computers and lasers. Physical knowledge increased so rapidly after 1900 that theory and experiment soon divided into separate specialties. Enrico Fermi, a supremely self-assured Italian American born in Rome in 1901, was the last great physicist to bridge the gap. His theory of beta decay introduced the last of the four basic forces known in nature (gravity, electromagnetism and, operating within the nucleus...
...accidental launch of a nuclear missile. Nuclear power plants could be vulnerable to the same difficulties. Last year, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission looked at the Seabrook plant in New Hampshire, it found that Y2K problems, unless fixed, would affect the computers that monitored such crucial functions as reactor-coolant levels and fuel-handling systems...
Fortunately, "Osama's buyers weren't physicists, and the people selling to him were trying to rip him off," says an Energy Department official. The enriched uranium they were offered turned out to be low-grade reactor fuel unusable for a weapon. Another con man tried to sell them radioactive garbage, claiming it was "red mercury," a supposedly lethal Russian bomb the CIA says never existed. Frustrated, bin Laden instead settled on chemical weapons, which are easier to manufacture. Although U.S. intelligence officials have been unable to pinpoint hidden caches, they suspect that during a five-year stay in Sudan...
Hoicka added that MIT's explanation that the reactor is used only for what he called "a handful of medical experiments" doesn...
...cost a fair amount of money to run this nuclear reactor," he said. "Who's paying for all of this? It doesn't make sense from just a budgetary standpoint...