Word: pile
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...Philippine Surplus Property Commission last October. But two other witnesses slightly changed the formidable picture of Mrs. Planas as a one-woman arsenal. Said her son Alberto: "My mother is a sick woman. There's really nothing in our depots that the army can use-just a pile of junk." Said her daughter Carmen: "Mother's ... 1,000 tanks are fictitious...
...famous Smyth Report (Atomic Energy for Military Purposes) appears this ominous sentence: "The fission products produced in one day's run of a 100,000-kilowatt chain-reacting pile might be sufficient to make a large area uninhabitable." The Smyth Report appeared in 1945. Since then, "radiological poisons" have hardly been mentioned, much less evaluated publicly as a military weapon...
Curies & Roentgens. Dr. Thirring calculated that each 100 uranium atoms that fission in a pile produce 61 atoms useful as radioactive poisons; i.e., their half-lives are not less than eight days (which would make them become harmless too quickly) or more than a year (which would make them too mild initially...
...rate of reaction of a pile is measured in kilowatts, so Thirring calculates how much war-useful radioactivity could be produced per kilowatt. The answer comes out in curies, the unit of radioactivity, and Thirring figures that for each kilowatt a pile produces in a month 250 curies of radioactive poisons...
Because nature often takes a bad picture, TV cameramen have learned a few tricks to titivate nature's frowzy face. Examples: strips of cloth dangled before a spotlight make a plausible flickering fire, and broken brown glass piled over a light bulb and sprinkled with titanium tetrachloride is a convincing pile of smoldering coals. Dry pablum, confetti or bleached corn flakes are used as a snow flurry; ice cream salt is hail, and raw white rice shaken from a colander looks enough like rain. Glycerine spray makes studio props appear...