Word: cesium
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Ramsey's procedure is so precise that the number of times the nucleus of a cesium atom rotates now can be measured with an accuracy of one part in a trillion...
...Ramsey's increased precision that enabled scientists to use the atomic clock for the official measurement of world time. In 1967, his method was used to redefine the second as the length of time it takes a cesium nucleus to rotate 9,192,631,770 times...
...dangerous pollution, and 75 FBI agents are currently there looking for proof of fraud in the disposal and incineration of plutonium-laden wastes. But what has environmental officials most puzzled is something they never expected to find even at trouble-prone Rocky Flats: traces of radioactive strontium and cesium that a nuclear chain reaction could produce -- even though there is no nuclear reactor at the site. The Environmental Protection Agency has demanded a study to determine how the mysterious isotopes got to Rocky Flats...
...previous nuclear accident victims, the Soviet doctor determined that four of the patients had been exposed to about 600 rads, a degree of radiation absorption equivalent to 4,000 chest X rays. Technicians sprayed six of the patients with cold water and scrubbed them with soap to remove any cesium from their skin. In an attempt to cleanse their bodies of any cesium they might have swallowed, the team of doctors fed them an iron compound called Prussian blue, which soaks up cesium and blocks its absorption by the body...
...Chernobyl, you had a nuclear fire that at the first stage affected the technicians in the plant," noted Selidovkin. "But there was no cesium 137 introduced into their bodies. Here the irradiation was both incorporated and local." Leide das Neves Ferreira, 6, who had eaten a cesium-tainted sandwich, continued to emit 25 rads a day, even after repeated efforts at decontamination. At that rate, the radioactivity in her body was destroying her bone marrow before it could produce white blood cells...