Word: pile
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There was this load of general supplies he'd gotten on the swindle sheet. And a pile of score cards from Braves Field and Fenway Park. And the slick program from the Longwood Cricket Club. There was the radio with a crack through its plastic side suffered the night he'd been a little athletic with an empty beer bottle. That would have to go. All this and only one small suitcase. There was a pile of magazines and newspapers Vag had hoped to take with him, the clippings from the Sporting News and the columns from the Stock Market...
...financial strength. But an analysis of these endowments raises the question of whether these gifts, generous as they are, will tide the University over the immediate emergencies of the next few years-whether Harvard had better look the gift horse in the face, lest the pretty toys pile up and the petted child starve...
These radiations are not peculiar to atomic bombs. They are also produced by the controlled chain reaction in a uranium pile or atomic power plant. The reaction itself generates powerful gamma rays and floods of neutrons. The uranium disintegrates, leaving a residue of highly active fission products. The neutrons, wandering through the pile, the cooling system and the concrete shield, stir up radioactivity. The pile may become "poisoned," and everything from it, or in contact with it, must be shunned like death...
Several approaches were guessable. A small plutonium pile might serve as a source of heat to drive some conventional engine, using steam or other fluid as a heat-transfer agent. More radical, and probably more interesting to imaginative technicians, would be a motor using atomic energy direct. This would be possible if "fissionable material" could be made to "explode slowly" like the propellent material in a bazooka projectile. The products of the slow explosion would have to stream out in one direction, giving a powerful, sustained push in the opposite direction. The obstacles blocking either approach were admittedly enormous. "Even...
Then the scientist nodded to TIME's correspondent. "Turn the switch." The switch looked like a valve on a gas stove, it turned easily. Control rods (probably of cadmium) clanged into place. They soaked up the vital neutrons faster than they were produced from the uranium. The pile stopped...