Word: plutonium
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...Bond (Pierce Brosnan) faces Russian terrorists bent on destroying Istanbul with hijacked plutonium so that they can wipe out three oil pipelines. This would allow for a fourth pipeline, running from Russia to the West, that would bear all of the oil, turning a tidy profit and endangering the United States' oil supply. In the end--sorry to ruin it--Bond kills the bad guys and sleeps with the heroine...
...factory, built in 1982, is part of the fuel supply line for an experimental fast-breeder nuclear power plant. It is where fissionable U-235 is combined with nitric acid to produce uranium dioxide, which is then combined at another plant with plutonium to produce the enriched uranium pellets used as breeder fuel. According to JCO, workers inexplicably mixed far more than the normal amount of uranium--35.2 lbs. instead of 5.2 lbs.--with the acid. Then they used stainless-steel buckets rather than pipes--again, inexplicably--to pour the liquefied uranium into the tank. The high concentration of uranium...
DIED. WALDO COHN, 89, Manhattan Project biochemist who helped develop plutonium for the atom bomb; in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Cohn's methods were later used in RNA and DNA research...
...Tuesday's approach that frightens the activists. Should Cassini pass too close to Earth and burn up in the atmosphere, they warn, radioactive plutonium in the generators that provide the craft's electricity could cause millions of cancer deaths. Most scientists and doctors scoff at such claims. Any plutonium vaporized in an accident, they explain, would be so diluted in the atmosphere that it would pose no real threat to most people. Still, activists say, had Cassini been equipped with solar panels for electricity, all danger could have been averted. But Saturn receives only a hundredth of the sunlight Earth...
...Saturn receives only a hundredth of the sunlight Earth does, and solar panels needed to supply Cassini at that distance would have to be far too large for such a mission. Other than plutonium generators, says physicist James Van Allen, discoverer of Earth's radiation belts, "there is no practical source of electrical power for spacecraft that go to the outer planets...