Word: uranium
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...never-ending scramble for a rapid dollar, Wall Street speculators can be moved to frenzy by the vaguest rumor. Their response to every economic fad and fancy is almost a conditioned reflex. In the uranium boom that followed World War II, the magic words atomic and nuclear rang through brokers' offices with the authority of an inside tip. Just about any company that managed to get that magic into its name, or to pass the word that it had even a fringe involvement in the field, enjoyed a profitable play in the market. Since then, the speculative incantation...
...British Physicist Otto Frisch once said: "Uranium is a prima donna difficult to seduce." While other European nations incorporated American expertise into their atomic power industries, France under Charles de Gaulle proudly clung to its own nuclear technology. The country's four atomic power plants use natural uranium, the only nuclear fuel available to France in large amounts. The least fissionable of atomic fuels, natural uranium requires costly installations. The system has been a technical success but an economic failure. Says Marcel Boiteux, general manager of Electricité de France, the state-controlled power network: "The cost of electricity...
...sharpest break yet with its Gaullist heritage, the government of President Georges Pompidou has just decided to build atomic power stations based on American technology. The government will ask for bids from interested companies and make its decision this spring. The new plants will burn enriched uranium, which is highly fissionable and relatively cheap to use. Almost all of the Western world's enriched uranium is produced in gaseous-diffusion plants owned by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. For a time, at least, France would become dependent on U.S. fuel. The government announcement angered French atomic workers, who face...
Czechoslovaks survived the war with their industrial plants largely intact, but then came the Communist coup of 1948. Prague adopted the Soviet economic system, and the Soviets, in turn, drained Czechoslovakia, buying its production at dictated prices. One notable example is uranium. Czechoslovakia had the world's first producing uranium mine, and it supplied the pitchblende from which Mme. Curie isolated radium. During the 1950s, Russia bought most of Czechoslovakia's uranium for the cost of production, which was set artificially low because the mines were manned largely by unpaid political prisoners and located on state-owned land...
...precisely the Government's wisdom that the Colorado scientists question. "It took the AEC three years to acknowledge that strontium 90 appeared in milk and was a hazard to human health," says Biochemist H. Peter Metzger. "The last time they supervised anything in Colorado, they allowed uranium miners to leave radioactive tailings lying around that could be blown over homes, farms and grazing lands and carried hundreds of miles downstream by rivers. The AEC is always saying things are 95% safe. We worry about the other...