Hottest Hot Spot

Nearly every up & coming laboratory now has a hot spot where radioactive material is handled with gingerly precaution. Hottest spot of this sort in any non-Government lab is the bottom of a water-filled tank at California's Stanford Research Institute, where a rod and four nesting cylinders of radioactive cobalt glow with a weird blue light. Together they weigh only 10 Ibs. and they cost only $22,500, but they give off as much radiation (4,500 curies) as $80 million worth of radium. If their shielding water were to leak away, they would give a man a fatal dose of radiation in seven seconds.

The hot cobalt "source," the most powerful yet released by the AEC, got its punch by soaking up neutrons for nearly eight months in the nuclear reactor at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island. It traveled across the country in a two-ton lead container. Stanford research-men still look at their dangerous captive with some awe, but they intend to put it to practical work, such as sterilizing delicate substances (e.g., penicillin) that are damaged when sterilized by heat.

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