Atomic Hints

Plenty is going on behind the U.S. atomic curtain, and once in a while a trickle of rumor, correct or incorrect, leaks through. Last week David M. Poole, an engineer working at Oak Ridge with NEPA (Nuclear Energy for Propulsion of Aircraft), gave an exciting hint to the Baltimore Society of Automotive Engineers.

Said Engineer Poole: the theory of the atom-driven airplane is "99% perfected." The long-haired scientists have done their work, he explained, and now it is up to the "slide-rule men" to translate theory into a tangible airplane.

What sort of engine would be used? Poole was vague. It would not be a nuclear turbojet, he said, or a steam turbine, or a ramjet. All these had been tried and found wanting. The atomic engine, said Poole, would be a "nuclear rocket." That was all he would say. The nature of the nuclear rocket, he said, is secret.

Another atomic hint came from Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis L. Strauss, speaking at the University of New Hampshire. He mentioned "packaged" nuclear power. It might be possible, he said, to place material in a uranium pile and make it highly radioactive by bombarding it with neutrons. Then it could be taken out and used as a kind of atomic storage battery to run a power plant.

Its rate of energy-release, said Commissioner Strauss, could not be controlled, but would decrease steadily according to the "half-life" of the radioactive material. But such a "storage battery" might have one big advantage. It would not give off, necessarily, the dangerous neutrons and penetrating gamma rays which leak from atomic piles. Some active isotopes emit only radiations that can be stopped by comparatively thin shielding. There might be no deadly byproducts, either, to endanger the neighborhood.

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