Word: uranium
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...made great strides, notes Dr. William H. Gordon in the medical magazine GP. Frequently the quackery is keyed to news of medical progress. Use of radioactive isotopes in medicine, for example, inspired some Comanche County, Texas entrepreneurs to sell packages of their local topsoil, which contained faint traces of uranium. Patients were supposed to sit with their feet in the topsoil for relief of rheumatism and other ailments...
Plutonium is found in nature only in tiny traces. But when fissionable U-235 is burned in a nuclear reactor with the U-238 that forms the bulk of natural uranium, some of the neutrons that it sends out are captured by the U-238 atoms, turning them into plutonium (Pu-239). The plutonium can then be separated from uranium by a comparatively simple chemical process. If the reactor is made right, it "breeds," i.e., it makes more plutonium than it burns U-235. Used as fuel in turn, the new-made plutonium breeds even faster, making good nuclear fuel...
...work, sleep and eat, while suety muscles harden. Management does them no favors; they do the same work as ordinary laborers and get the same wages. When classes begin, the props are Spartan: a few books, a folding blackboard. Recalls Welfare Worker Dean Bowman, who arrived at the Geco uranium mines in northwestern Ontario four years ago fresh from Ohio's Antioch College: "I was a complete stranger, carrying expensive luggage, who bore all too much resemblance to a run-of-the-mill college boy." Bowman soon developed "calluses over blisters," managed not to look "too slack alongside experienced...
Under vacuum, cesium turns partly to gas. As the uranium heats up. it ionizes the cesium gas to a plasma of charged particles (electrons wrenched from their atoms). As in conventional thermocouples, there is a flow of electric current between hot and cold: from the hot (2,000° C.) junction of the uranium and ionized cesium to the cold (300° C.) junction of the cesium and the oil coolant...
After twelve hours, the device had to be shut down because the uranium fission produces gas as a byproduct that dilutes the plasma and dangerously raises the pressure inside the can. In future plasma thermocouples, this can be solved by bleeding off the gas. But the cesium plasma proved to have a thermoelectric efficiency much higher than any combination of solid metals...