Word: strontium
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...know about weather conditions in the most inaccessible parts of the earth, but in many such places manned stations are almost impossible to maintain. The U.S. Weather Bureau and the Atomic Energy Commission now propose an automatic weather station that gets all the electricity and heat it needs from strontium 90, a long-lived radioisotope...
...Strontium 90 is the notorious element in fallout that masquerades as calcium and lodges in human bones. But it is plentiful in the byproducts of plutonium manufacture, and the AEC's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, taking careful precautions, decided to use it. It was converted into strontium titanate, which is chemically inert and virtually insoluble, then formed into eleven pellets and welded into a three-layer jacket. All this had to be done by remote control from behind thick radiation shields-or the operators would not have lived to do more work...
...Experts are still far from final agreement on how much radioactive strontium 90 the human system can tolerate without damage, but to be on the safe side, Health Secretary Arthur S. Flemming last week cut the maximum permissible dose to less than half the previously accepted figure-from 80 to 33 millionths of a millionth of a curie per quart of milk, and equivalent readings in food and air. ¶ Insurance against the costs of cancer care was offered in a simplified policy by New York's Standard Security Life Insurance Co., with maximum total benefits...
...Highest Tree (by Dore Schary) is a disaster of good intentions. The author of Sunrise at Campobello is writing in protest: he is one of the people who, aware of the danger of strontium 90 in the air, would ban further nuclear test explosions. Playwright Schary's central figure, Dr. Aaron Cornish (Kenneth MacKenna) is a famous atomic scientist stricken, very possibly because of his nuclear activities, with acute leukemia. In any case, after self-searching, he determines to spend what months remain to him urging an end to nuclear-bomb tests...
...Britain a dozen scientists working for the Medical Research Council were taking test doses of two radioactive iso-fopes of strontium. With atomic numbers 85 and 87, these are less deadly than strontium 89 or 90, but still have enough activity for their presence and distribution in the body to be checked by radiation counters. Missing from the evidence being studied in this test: any mention of how much strong, black tea the volunteers were tippling...