Word: shrapnel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...plutonium pellets in the generators, designed by General Electric, is surrounded by an iridium shell. Coated pellets are then encased by two graphite shells and finally by an aluminum shroud. The U.S. Department of Energy has spent $50 million testing the generators. In one experiment, engineers fired shrapnel traveling 700 ft. per sec. at the iridium casings. None was pierced. In another test, scientists tacked an RTG to a solid rocket booster and blew it up. No damaged graphite shells were detected...
Something unprecedented had happened. Not only had the plane's tail engine lost its cone, but its fan had literally shattered. The disintegrating engine somehow flung shrapnel-like chunks of hot metal past the chamber designed to contain any such breakup. The pieces apparently ripped into all three hydraulic lines that converge at the tail, killing or at least vastly reducing hydraulic pressure...
...city. For the 1.2 million residents of Beirut, the past month has been a living hell. Rival militias have relentlessly pounded the Muslim and Christian halves of Beirut, with shells tearing into houses, apartment buildings, schools and even hospitals. Ambulances careen through deserted streets scooping up bodies sliced by shrapnel. During early-morning lulls, men scurry out to buy increasingly scarce bread and bottled water. Then they stop at pharmacies to stock up on tranquilizers to help them get through the next barrage...
...wife of the captain of the U.S.S. Vincennes leaps out of her van an instant before a pipe bomb blows it up on a San Diego street. A Japanese Red Army terrorist, allegedly heading for a Navy recruiting station in Manhattan, is nabbed on the New Jersey Turnpike with shrapnel bombs. Bookstores in Berkeley are fire bombed for selling Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses...
...your real mom." Her idea of a high time is going out to dinner at a restaurant "that don't have a drive-through." Hearing that two friends have got divorced, she responds with resentful sarcasm: "They shoulda stuck it out in the trenches, dodgin' that shrapnel with the rest of us that believe in true love...