Word: plutonium
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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What turned out to be one of Apollo 12's most valuable tools-the hammer-again came in handy before the deployment of ALSEP. While Bean offered encouragement ("Pound harder. Keep going, baby"), Conrad tapped on the plutonium core, which had become stuck in its protective cask. Finally loosened, the core was removed and inserted into the generator. Without the core, the generator would have been unable to provide electricity to power ALSEP's experiments and its radio gear...
...structure; 2) an ion detector capable of determining the nature of charged electrical particles near the lunar surface; 3) a cold cathode gauge to measure the density of the thin lunar atmosphere. Powered by an atomic generator that will produce electricity from the heat given off by its radioactive plutonium core, these instruments are designed to radio back telltale clues about the moon's makeup for at least a year...
...citizens with facts for intelligent protest. The group includes leading lawyers, chemists, geologists and physicists, including Edward U. Condon, former chief of the National Bureau of Standards. In recent months, it has uncovered Army nerve gas stored casually near Denver's airport and probed the whereabouts of radioactive plutonium lost in a fire at a Dow-operated nuclear plant near Boulder. But so far, nothing has worried the committee as much as Project Rulison...
...project and saved Lawrence from great embarrassment. But the postwar years brought another. Putting his prestige and influence in Washington to work, Lawrence overcame the objections of other scientists and won approval for the construction of a monstrous proton accelerator for converting nonfissionable uranium 238 into fission able plutonium, which could be used in nuclear weapons. This time, after three years and huge expenditures, Lawrence completed the accelerator. But to his chagrin, it produced an effective beam of protons for only two hours, then burned out and never could be used again...
...there was Louis Slotin, a morose Canadian with an apparent death wish, who conducted tests of critical assemblies by poking curved segments of uranium or plutonium together with a screwdriver while eying his Geiger counter and neutron monitor. One day in 1946, nudging segments of a Bikini test bomb a little too close, he suddenly saw a blue ionization glow in the room-the sign of a dangerously radioactive reaction. He threw his body over the segments until everyone else in the room could hurry out. Although the others lived, Slotin achieved his death wish. He died in agony nine...