Word: snapping
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...should've brought my camera," drawled a gangling Virginia youngster as he strolled into Theodore Ficklin Elementary School in Washington's bedroom suburb of Alexandria one morning last week. But the only crowd worth a snap was the throng of reporters and cameramen on hand for the third Virginia city's peaceful integration (the other two: Arlington and Norfolk) since Governor J. Lindsay Almond Jr. ordered orderly acceptance of the inevitable (TIME, Feb. 9). Result: in Alexandria 2,300 white pupils mixed easily with nine Negro newcomers, amiably greeted them aboard school buses...
Even the bush-league hams who stick to the tank towns eat high on around $12,000 a year. Everywhere the violent routine is just about the same: drop kicks that could snap a man's neck if the act were honest and they really landed in the face, bullet heads pounded boomingly against unyielding ring posts, ear biting, eye gouging, hair pulling, and plain, old-fashioned strangling...
...SNAP III's heart is a pinpoint one-hundredth of an ounce of radioactive polonium 210 encased in a molybdenum capsule. The polonium's entrapped radiation heats the capsule to above 700° F. Arranged around it like the spokes of a wheel are 20 thermocouples made of lead telluride. When their ends are heated by the capsule, a flow of electrons is set up in the thermocouples, producing an electric current. At peak power, SNAP III can turn out five watts. Before most of its polonium (half life: 140 days) is exhausted, SNAP III will generate...
...SNAP III was developed under a modest $15,000 AEC contract with the Martin Co. of Baltimore working in conjunction with the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co. But the polonium, which is made by radiating bismuth in an atomic pile, costs about $10 per curie. SNAP's charge is the equivalent of 3,000 curies, bringing the price of fuel in the capsule to $30,000. An AEC official explained that some cheaper isotope might later be substituted for polonium. If cerium 144 can be used, the unit cost might be as low as $600 per battery...
...excited AEC spokesman compared SNAP III to the discovery of gasoline as a source of power. Scientists were more restrained. SNAP III is an impressive achievement, they point out, but it is an application of an old principle. It merely converts the energy coming from polonium to its lowest form, heat-the standard process in any atomic power plant-and the production of electricity from heat (by means of thermocouples) is a familiar process. The conversion of nuclear radiation directly into electricity -an exciting possibility that is being vigorously explored in many laboratories -is yet to come...