Word: toed
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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When natural uranium is put in a chain-reacting pile, its U-235 atoms start splitting and yielding energy, "fission products" and free neutrons. Some of the neutrons are needed to split more U-235 atoms and keep the reaction going. Others are absorbed by impurities or escape from the...
Burn-Out. Plutonium is fissionable and a fine nuclear fuel, but the first reactors did not produce enough of it to replace the U-235 consumed. So their nuclear fuel gradually "burned out," leaving U-238 as a sort of ash. Thus, the reactors of the early atomic age could...
The AEC's new breeders, or converters, will lessen the waste, presumably by causing more neutrons to be absorbed byU-238. If the amount of plutonium or other nuclear fuel thus produced is larger than the U-235 consumed, the pile could continue in operation for a very long...
An exciting bit of atomic gossip was loudly whispered about last week through Washington's resonant corridors. Tipsters were insisting that U.S. scientists are working on "the hydrogen bomb." The rumors started when Colorado's Senator Edwin Johnson, member of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, told...
The full, round figure alerted Washington's amateur physicists. According to fairly dependable estimates, the Hiroshima bomb developed not more than 10% of the fission energy present in its nuclear explosive. Perfect efficiency (probably impossible) would therefore give about ten times as much power, certainly not 1,000 times...