Word: tritium
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...them as in fission-still remains what it has been for a generation: a possibility. But in a number of laboratories and one private company-KMS Industries of Ann Arbor, Mich.-scientists are moving closer to doing what they know can be done: fusing the nuclei of deuterium and tritium to create a powerful burst of energy. At KMS and the Government's Los Alamos lab, lasers are being used to "implode" deuterium pellets. Energy has been produced, but not enough to be measured accurately or drive the laser. Within three to five years, scientists hope to reach that...
Inside the Princeton doughnut-shaped Tokamak, deuterium and tritium (both isotopes, or different forms, of hydrogen) will serve as fusion fuel. In the form of a plasma (a high-temperature, ionized gas), the fuel will be suspended within powerful magnetic fields. Thus the gas will be supported by nothing but magnetic force and will be insulated from the steel walls of the reactor. If the plasma touched the wall, the wall would be heated, the plasma would be contaminated and its temperature lowered. The powerful magnetic fields will be manipulated to squeeze the plasma, raising its temperature and increasing...
...controlled fusion can occur only under conditions of very high temperature and density that researchers have tried for years to produce by using powerful magnetic fields to squeeze or confine isotopes of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium. But even the best of these "magnetic bottles" -which require tremendous amounts of energy to operate-have so far been unable to provide the necessary temperature and density for more than a tiny fraction of a second...
Lately scientists have been turning to a more efficient tool for creating fusion: the laser. By heating a tiny pellet of deuterium or tritium with a powerful pulse of laser light, they cause the explosive evaporation of the pellet's surface. As the material sprays off, the rest of the pellet implodes. The hydrogen nuclei are thus forced together. As early as 1968, a team of Soviet researchers under Physicist Nikolai Basov, a Nobel laureate, reported that they had used lasers to ignite a brief but clearly detectable fusion reaction. Since then, their experiments have been repeated-and improved...
...total of $11 million but yielded gas that would be worth only $1.5 million-if it were uncontaminated and of high quality. Unfortunately, the gas released by Rulison is chemically inferior to gas from conventional wells in the same field and contains excessive amounts of radioactive byproducts like tritium. The cheapest way to correct those faults, the AEC says, would be to mix one unit of the contaminated Rulison gas with up to 50 units of high-quality nonradioactive gas. But to do so would require an abundance of uncontaminated natural gas, which is what the nuclear program was supposed...