Word: tritium
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...early postwar period, the prospects for fusion did not look very good. The available light elements-lithium, ordinary hydrogen and deuterium (heavy hydrogen)-seemed to require more heat than could be provided by the first atom bombs. The third hydrogen isotope, tritium, looked more promising. A mixture of tritium (H³) and deuterium (H²) will ignite at a comparatively low temperature, turning into helium (He4) and a free neutron, and giving a big yield of energy...
...disadvantage of tritium is that it does not exist in nature. It has to be made at fantastic cost in nuclear reactors. Optimistic physicists hoped that a small priming of tritium would ignite large amounts of light elements that are not so hard to come by. Pessimists feared that too much tritium would be required. They pointed out that each atom of tritium manufactured in a nuclear reactor costs about one atom of U-235 or plutonium, which could be used to better advantage, they thought, in old-style fission bombs...
...optimists won the argument, and a tritium-production program got under way. The great Savannah River plant (cost: $1.5 billion) was largely built for this purpose. As things finally turned out, it may not have been necessary...
...same principle as the carbon 14 calendar. Some ten miles high, in the stratosphere, cosmic rays stream in from outer space. With far more force than an atom-smasher, the cosmic rays collide with nitrogen atoms. The crash produces hydrogen, carbon 14 and a minute amount of radioactive tritium. The atoms of cosmic tritium join molecules of water vapor and fall to the earth in snow and rain...
...Tritium has a half-life of 12½ years, i.e., half its radioactivity is dissipated in that time. "If our calculations are correct," says Chemist Libby, "then water 12½ years old should be only half as radioactive as new rainwater or snow...