Word: plutonium
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...first blush, it was hard to believe that there could be much wrong with life in Richland, Wash., the Atomic Energy Commission's model residential city for the big Hanford Plutonium Works. Its 24,000 residents seemed to live in an atomic-age Utopia. With no effort from them, Government planning had methodically channeled the city's burgeoning population into neatly curving rows of comfortable frame houses. Sputtering Government sprinklers had drawn green grass from the arid Columbia River basin in defiance of the gritty desert winds from the Horse Heaven Hills...
...start splitting and yielding energy, "fission products" and free neutrons. Some of the neutrons are needed to split more U-235 atoms and keep the reaction going. Others are absorbed by impurities or escape from the pile. The rest enter the atoms of U-238, ultimately turn them into plutonium...
Burn-Out. Plutonium is fissionable and a fine nuclear fuel, but the first reactors did not produce enough of it to replace the U-235 consumed. So their nuclear fuel gradually "burned out," leaving U-238 as a sort of ash. Thus, the reactors of the early atomic age could utilize only a very small part of the uranium fed into them...
...breeders, or converters, will lessen the waste, presumably by causing more neutrons to be absorbed byU-238. If the amount of plutonium or other nuclear fuel thus produced is larger than the U-235 consumed, the pile could continue in operation for a very long time. First the original U-235 would be consumed, yielding energy and plutonium made out of 11-238. Then some of the plutonium would fission, yielding energy and creating more atomic fuel. Theoretically, the process might continue until all the 11-238 is consumed. Natural uranium could yield something like 140 times as much energy...
...these and other technical reasons, scientists heard the news about Russian science with respect and foreboding. If the U.S.S.R. is producing plutonium, it has come a long way in the four years of its sped-up atomic-bomb program...