Word: tritium
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...down trees, to evacuate. At precisely 3:45 p.m., three devices explode in five seconds: a normal fission bomb, a low-yield bomb for tactical battlefield use and something like a hydrogen bomb, which U.S. officials later insist could have been only a less powerful "boosted" weapon using tritium fuses to amplify the fission chain reaction. Altogether they unleash around 80 kilotons of atomic power, six times as powerful as the Fat Boy dropped on Hiroshima. The ground shakes sharply beneath the village of Khetolai, cracking houses and crashing plates to the floor. Eyewitnesses see a 325-ft.-high dust...
...January, the lab announced that it had discovered an underground spill of radioactive tritium beneath one of the lab's two nuclear reactors, which has now been shut down...
...clock crept toward 11:15 p.m. last Thursday, the 500 scientists and engineers packed into the control room and an adjacent auditorium at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory kept their eyes riveted on a bank of computer monitors. They waited anxiously as technicians injected less than 1 oz. of tritium gas into the doughnut-shaped hollow at the heart of a 50-ft.- tall reactor in the next room. Then they waited some more as the tritium mixed with deuterium gas already inside and the combination was heated with powerful radio beams...
...main attraction of fusion is the potentially limitless fuel supply. The ideal fuel is not plain hydrogen but the formula used last week: a mixture of deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen that have extra neutrons in their nuclei. Even though they're rarer than ordinary hydrogen, scientists estimate that enough of these two isotopes could be extracted from the top 2 in. of water in Lake Erie to match the energy in all the world's oil reserves...
...conditional on a prompt agreement to maintain effective control of nuclear weapons. The West should then offer to pay for, and send experts to supervise, the disabling of as many weapons as the republics want to shed. Great masses of warheads could quickly be rendered harmless by removing their tritium bottles and krytron triggers. And the key is to move immediately. The forces of dissolution in the former Soviet Union are picking up startling momentum, and the West must not be lulled by the fact that for the moment, the nuclear warheads remain under the hands of relatively responsible leaders...