Word: reactors
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...REACTOR FOR EGYPT. Under normal conditions, safeguards are good enough, but the problem is what would happen if the Egyptians should decide to expel the Americans in the way that they expelled the Russians? Then they would have the radioactive materials and no control. This is a global problem, and a world answer must be found...
Until recently, the greatest deterrent to amateur bombmaking was the scarcity of the key ingredient. Both weapons and nuclear reactors need fissionable material to sustain a chain reaction -the familiar energy-producing process in which tiny, fast-moving neutrons released by the breakup (fission) of one unstable atom smash into the nuclei of neighboring atoms, causing them to split. The common reactor fuel-which was also used in the bomb that leveled Hiroshima-is a fissionable isotope of uranium called U-235. But U-235 accounts for only about one out of every 140 atoms of uranium in nature...
Until recently, there has been little peaceful use for plutonium, and most of the small amounts produced by utility companies has been either stockpiled or used for research. But as methods for using this material are perfected, plutonium will become an increasingly common reactor fuel. As a result, traffic in the stuff will swell. It will be shipped from processing plants to fabricating plants (where it is made into fuel rods that are unusable for weapons), to nuclear installations, and then back again for reprocessing. In addition, the AEC's highly touted "breeders," a new generation of reactors that...
...potential damage from a single reactor is in the range of tens of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of casualities," Nader said...
...Nuclear plants are unreliable: at any given time, one-third [of the 43 reactors in the U.S.] are shut down for repairs and other problems," Nader said. The amount of radioactive material contained in a single reactor varies from one to two thousands times as much as was contained in the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, he said...