Word: reactors
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...glamorous program for peacetime uses of nuclear energy? In 1946, the Manhattan District had predicted that an experimental atomic power plant would be ready for testing in two years. But last week this plan was still far from realization. Grumbled Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, "It seems as though every reactor is always two years off." What had gone wrong...
...type that comes into use will depend largely on the supply of uranium. If uranium is cheap and plentiful, it will be used more or less in the natural state. If uranium proves scarce, the supply can be eked out by "breeding." A reactor will be surrounded by a blanket of thorium or the plentiful but nonfissionable uranium isotope, U-238. When these absorb excess neutrons from the reaction, they turn into fissionable plutonium...
Construction. The AEC tells little about its vast building program, expected to cost $1,250,000,000. The Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, with its nuclear reactor, is "well under way." Fifteen thousand workers are busy at Hanford, Wash., presumably expanding the vast plutonium works. The super-secret weapons plant and laboratory at Los Alamos, N. Mex. are being renovated and extended...
...Andrew Kalitinsky of Fairchild Engine & Airplane Corp. (which is working under the Atomic Energy Commission) recently explained the problem at a Manhattan meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers. In outline, the job looks simple. A "nuclear reactor" (essentially a controlled, slow-exploding atom bomb) gives off most of its energy as heat. One way to do the trick is to put a reactor in place of the combustion chambers of a turbojet engine (see chart). A compressor forces air into the forward end of the engine. Heated and expanded by the nuclear reactor, the air shoots toward the rear...
...Engine. All this is not as simple as it sounds. A small, controlled reactor has been built (TIME, Sept. 8), but putting one into a jet engine involves tremendous difficulties. The reactor must run very hot, but not burn itself out. It must transfer enormous amounts of heat to the "working fluid" (air) without slowing the blast too much...