Atomic piles

Usage examples of reactors.

The engines, called hydroturbines, were actually thermonuclear reactors of the flowstream type, and hydrogen in high vacuum served as their fuel.

But the power that the reactors provided more than made up for those little shortcomings.

A ship with such a drive could therefore neither take off from a planet itself, being too massive, nor by itself achieve the velocity at which the atoms falling into the intakes of the reactors condensed sufficiently for ignition.

Full of force that throbbed in the reactors with greater-than-solar heat, the thing meant Earth to him, the Earth that had sent him to the stars.

And, if breeder reactors were used - in which fuel is recycled time and time again - only one-tenth of the natural uranium would be needed.

During an Atomic Energy Commission survey it was estimated that if one of our current standard-type reactors exploded, it would devastate an area the size of Pennsylvania and slaughter forty-five thousand people, either immediately or through the slow, agonizing death from radiation sickness.

This processing results in fresh plutonium, which can be used as fuel by itself in fast reactors, or mixed with uranium in low breeder reactors.

It is thought that one day these developments can lead to the large-scale confinement of hot hydrogen for fusion reactors to generate domestic power, gradually replacing the various types, of fission reactors used at present.

I watched the countdown, and the totally unimpressive lighting of the plasma torch at the rear of the long, lumpy, completely unlovely congregate of landers, orbiters, propulsion modules, reactors, solar panels.

Seeing to the pumps and reactors did not necessarily mean shutting such systems down.