When Russia's top nuclear engineers visited Oak Ridge National Laboratory last fall, the thing that impressed them most was a cylindrical, tanklike object 55 ft. long. They sat in rows of chairs while short, slender Dr. Alvin M. Weinberg, the 44-year-old physicist who is the lab's director, told them what was inside the tank: an experimental reactor in which liquid fuel replaces the troublesome solid-fuel elements of conventional power reactors. "A very bold idea," conceded Professor Vasily S. Emelyanov, chief of the Russian group. Last week Dr. Weinberg cautiously told his laboratory mates...
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