Word: uranium
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Damaged Spots. The General Electric dating method, which was developed with Air Force backing, depends on the fact that nearly all rocks, including tektites and impactites, contain small traces of uranium. The uranium atoms split, at a slow, known rate and the fission fragments damage the glassy material in which they are embedded. The damaged spots are microscopic, but they can be made visible by a special etching technique. When they are carefully counted and compared with the amount of uranium present, those spots tell how long they have been accumulating and the date when the rock solidified...
...world into the age of the atom. In 1939, he was one of the five farsighted scientists* who wrote a letter for Albert Einstein to send to President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggesting that "it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power would be generated." He was present at the University of Chicago's secrecy-shrouded squash court under the Stagg Field stands when the first nuclear reactor went critical on Dec. 2, 1942. He was responsible for the design of the great plutonium reactors...
Marinas & Uranium. In search of diversification, Socony has in the past year investigated 123 projects, from oil-fired air conditioners to marinas and country clubs. Last week Socony bought nine plants producing paints and industrial coatings from Martin Marietta Corp. Some other companies wander farther afield: Kerr-McGee bought a railroad tie producer, Tidewater a uranium mine in Wyoming and the exploration rights for diamonds in Hottentot Bay, South West Africa. Kern County Land Co., a California oil producer, gets more than half its gross revenues from turning out auto parts...
...attractive for several reasons. They pour no smoke, fly ash or combustion gases into a city's overburdened atmosphere. Since they are close to load-centers, they need no long and costly transmission lines. What is equally important in crowded urban areas, a two-year supply of uranium fuel for a million-kilowatt plant can be stored in the space of an average living room...
...there is potential danger in any nuclear plant. After it has run for a while, the fuel in its core (Con Ed plans to use 113 tons of uranium oxide) is contaminated with fiercely radioactive fission products. If this unpleasant stuff got spread around the countryside by any sort of explosion, it would do as much harm as the fallout from an atom bomb. Millions of people live within a few miles of Con Ed's projected installation. To reduce this danger to a minimum, the plant proposed for the Borough of Queens, on New York's East...