Word: protons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Tritium, an isotope of hydrogen that contains two neutrons and a proton in its nucleus, occurs naturally in minute quantities in raindrops and groundwater. But the radioactive gas took on strategic importance in 1952, when the U.S. exploded its first hydrogen bomb. That explosion demonstrated the destructive force that can be released when tritium fuses with deuterium, another hydrogen isotope, to yield helium and a burst of nuclear energy. Today, tritium is used both to enhance the power of atom bombs and in the trigger mechanism of the far more destructive H-bomb. Because it decays at the rate...
...been the U.S. Government, which refuses to let American firms launch satellites on Soviet rockets. Washington insists that such a practice would violate laws against the transfer of advanced technology. But Dula is pressing the Administration for a license to place a U.S. communications satellite aboard a Soviet Proton rocket. His perseverance is understandable. The Soviets would probably charge more than $50 million for a launch; Dula's company, Space Commerce, would pocket half the profit...
That is not to say that the U.S. is second rate. The Tevatron, an accelerator at Fermilab, near Chicago, that smashes together protons and antiprotons, is still the most powerful collider in the world, and the proposed superconducting supercollider, planned for Texas, will be more powerful still. Proton-antiproton collisions entail more energy than electron- positron collisions and thus are more likely to generate previously undiscovered particles. But proton-antiproton impacts generate more subatomic debris, which makes it harder to study the properties of individual particles carefully. For what Amaldi calls "precision physics," Europe could soon...
...type of atom most common in fusion reactions is a form of hydrogen called deuterium. Although most hydrogen nuclei consist of just a positively charged proton, deuterium also contains an uncharged particle called a neutron...
Scientists theorize that conventional fusion yields one of two products: a helium nucleus consisting of two protons and one neutron and a high-energy neutron; or a radioactive form of hydrogen made up of two neutrons and a proton and a hydrogen...