Word: vapor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Poison for Toads. The reactor itself was completely gone, its graphite moderator and several hundred pounds of uranium fuel turned to vapor by temperatures above 8,000°F., roughly the same as the surface of the sun. For a fraction of a second before it evaporated, the reactor had generated millions of times as much energy as Hoover...
...giant balloon hoisted the Johns Hopkins telescope 16 miles high-high enough to get it up above most of the dust and water vapor in the Earth's atmosphere, high enough for a clear look at the dark-blue daytime sky where stars and planets glow with hardly diminished brilliance. Most important of all, it was high enough for the mechanized scope to scan accurately the infra red rays from the sun that were being bounced off Venus...
Steady Flow. This is the job that has been taken over by the big steel cylinders, otherwise known as mercury-arc valves. Perfected for high-voltage use by Dr. Uno Lamm of Sweden's ASEA company, they are filled with hot mercury vapor and act like instantaneous switches. High-voltage AC from step-up transformers runs into them, and whenever the current changes its direction, it is switched to the opposite pole of a DC transmission line. A bank of valves switching in unison produces a steady flow of current...
...transmission line, the same valves are used in a different hookup. The current flowing through their mercury vapor is stopped and started by a control-voltage applied to a grid. This second switching produces alternating current that can be fed into transformers and reduced to the low voltages needed by the customers...
...exhaust-laden air is trapped in the mountain-rimmed Los Angeles basin, the bright Southern California sunshine, which could be expected to burn off a simple, old-fashioned fog, goes to work on the invisible gases until a giant photochemical reaction takes place. The pallid, evil-smelling vapor that results is known as smog...