Word: tritium
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...ACSR--which advises the Corporation on the ethical implications of Harvard's investment policy--voted to support a resolution sponsored by several Church groups that calls on Du Pont to half its management of the Savannah River plant. At the South Carolina plant. Du Pont produces plutonium and tritium for nuclear weapons, as well as conducting research on nuclear arms for the U.S. Department of Energy...
...warheads that defense specialists estimate will be added to the U.S. nuclear arsenal by the mid-1990s. But according to congressional testimony earlier this year by F. Charles Gilbert, an Energy Department nuclear expert, the lack not only of plutonium but also of tritium, an associated radioactive gas, threatens eventually to present "a serious problem...
Unlike rockets, missiles launched by railguns would not leave fiery, polluting exhausts detectable by satellite. In a forthcoming issue, Physics Today reports that some scientists think that railguns, firing a stream of high-velocity particles at a target of deuterium and tritium, may offer the best way yet of achieving controlled fusion, a key energy hope for the future. Perhaps the most far-reaching application involves the space colonization ideas of Princeton Physicist Gerard O'Neill. He and some colleagues at M.I.T. are already building models of kindred electromagnetic launchers that they believe could be assembled on the moon...
...week's end the plan was to cart off the tritium to the Navajo Army depot, a federal munitions dump near Flagstaff, Ariz. There it could be processed for sale, fed at a safe rate into the atmosphere or dumped at a nuclear waste site. But when a Flagstaff judge issued a restraining order against the transport, its destination became dubious...
Another question lingered: Was the leaking truly dangerous? Though radioactive, tritium is a hydrogen isotope emitting only low-energy beta particles that cannot penetrate uncut skin. If ingested, tritium may mix with body chemicals, but no biological damage has ever been proven. That ambiguity did not trouble state officials. "If a person breathes in tritium, it doesn't have to be strong to do harm," contends Ken Geiser, acting director of the Arizona atomic energy commission...