Word: uranium
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...North Africa and Asia of their historic plagues of locusts by means of cross-border aerial patrols and insecticide raids. Since 1966 the program's various studies-such as surveys that pinpoint copper lodes in Argentina, Panama and Turkey, iron ore in Chile and Gabon, and uranium in Somalia -have helped stimulate $5 billion in follow-up private investment. More than a third of all aid has gone to Africa and more than a quarter to Asia for assistance in such basic needs as agriculture, industry and public utilities...
Pomona Elementary's problem is shared in less acute form by buildings in at least a dozen other Colorado communities and by Grand Junction itself, an important uranium-producing town until the ore petered out in the mid-1960s. The villain is uranium "tailings" -the gray, sandy debris that piled up in small mountains beside the mills as refuse from the mining operations. The tailings were known to contain some residual radiation, but below levels the AEC then considered to be a health or safety hazard. As the town boomed along with its uranium mines, Grand Junction contractors seized...
...town was slow to take alarm. Paul Hathaway, regional editor of Grand Junction's Daily Sentinel, explains: "Uranium turned this from a sleepy little cow town to a booming city. They accept it as part of their existence. That's why you don't see a lot of immediate concern about the tailings." As Frank Folk, who is principal of a local school, puts it: "I'd just as soon be here in the clear air with the tailings as in some of those cities with their smog...
...electricity will double in the decade ahead and multiply as much as six times by the year 2000. Yet the fossil fuels that are needed to generate this crucial power by conventional means-oil, coal, natural gas-are being exhausted at an alarming rate. So, too, are reserves of uranium 235, which nuclear reactors now use as fuel. Meanwhile, such alternatives as harnessing the energy of the sun-or of the earth's tides, winds, or internal heat-remain little more than scientific pipedreams. Even the vision of controlling the power of the hydrogen bomb will probably...
Ordinary reactors "burn" uranium 235, which eventually becomes stable lead. Breeders use either U-235 or man-made plutonium for fuel, but also use as a "fertile" material (a nonfissionable substance that absorbs excess neutrons freed in the chain reaction and becomes fissionable) another form of uranium called U-238. In addition to being more common than U-235, this uranium isotope, when struck by a hurtling neutron, does not break apart as does U-235. Instead, it absorbs the particle and is transmuted, by 20th century alchemy, into fissionable plutonium. Thus the breeder's fertile material is gradually...