Word: uranium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Public Health Service reported last week some disturbing byproducts of the Atomic Age. For a year its experts studied the Animas River in Colorado and New Mexico, whose water is used for the homes of 30,000 people. Below the Durango, Colo. uranium refinery of the Vanadium Corp. of America, the water was loaded with radium from the plant's wastes. Some samples were 160% above the maximum level officially considered safe for health. Vanadium Corp. has agreed to do something at once...
...made great strides, notes Dr. William H. Gordon in the medical magazine GP. Frequently the quackery is keyed to news of medical progress. Use of radioactive isotopes in medicine, for example, inspired some Comanche County, Texas entrepreneurs to sell packages of their local topsoil, which contained faint traces of uranium. Patients were supposed to sit with their feet in the topsoil for relief of rheumatism and other ailments...
Plutonium is found in nature only in tiny traces. But when fissionable U-235 is burned in a nuclear reactor with the U-238 that forms the bulk of natural uranium, some of the neutrons that it sends out are captured by the U-238 atoms, turning them into plutonium (Pu-239). The plutonium can then be separated from uranium by a comparatively simple chemical process. If the reactor is made right, it "breeds," i.e., it makes more plutonium than it burns U-235. Used as fuel in turn, the new-made plutonium breeds even faster, making good nuclear fuel...
...work, sleep and eat, while suety muscles harden. Management does them no favors; they do the same work as ordinary laborers and get the same wages. When classes begin, the props are Spartan: a few books, a folding blackboard. Recalls Welfare Worker Dean Bowman, who arrived at the Geco uranium mines in northwestern Ontario four years ago fresh from Ohio's Antioch College: "I was a complete stranger, carrying expensive luggage, who bore all too much resemblance to a run-of-the-mill college boy." Bowman soon developed "calluses over blisters," managed not to look "too slack alongside experienced...
After twelve hours, the device had to be shut down because the uranium fission produces gas as a byproduct that dilutes the plasma and dangerously raises the pressure inside the can. In future plasma thermocouples, this can be solved by bleeding off the gas. But the cesium plasma proved to have a thermoelectric efficiency much higher than any combination of solid metals...