Perilous Panacea

 

The Pittsburgh Stealers

A Techno-Thriller Novel
       Ronald Klueh           
Once, Ralph Evers had it all:  a fine family and a job as a scientist building the world’s fastest computers.  When he lost his job, he and a friend started a computer business.  They ran out of money, Ralph turned to alcohol, and lost his wife.  That’s when his problems began. 
It is 1970, a year demon­stra­tions against the Vietnam War that culminated in the killings at Kent State.  Still search­ing for money for his company, Ralph is oblivious to the turbulence until his daughter Cindy is caught with a Weatherman bomb in her car.  She claims the FBI set her up.  Needing big money for bail and a lawyer, Ralph is talked into a computer bank robbery.  He gets the money, which he intends to pay back, but he is twice blackmailed and becomes involved in industrial espionage, and murder by computer.  With the help of The Pittsburgh Stealer—a native-American hacker—he becomes a Pittsburgh Stealer to get Cindy freed from the bombing charge.  With Cindy’s help, he escapes the blackmailers


High-Chromium Ferritic and Martensitic Steels for Nuclear Applications

 Ronald L. Klueh and Donald R. Harries
Ferritic and martensitic steels have a long history of use in the power-generation industry as boiler material.  Chromium-molybdenum steels originated in the 1920s, and the 9-12Cr steels, which are the primary steels of interest here, were first used in the 1940s.  Beginning in the 1960s, the steels became of interest for use as fuel cladding and duct materials for the liquid metal fast reactor.  This was followed in the late 1970s by the steels being considered as structural materials for first wall and blanket structures of a fusion reactor.  These applications require the steels to be resistant to irradiation damage by high-energy neutrons, in addition to the need for elevated-temperature strength.  Just as alloy development was required for the earlier application, development was required for the nuclear application, development that is still in progress.
The primary subject of this book is the development of the ferritic/martensitic steels for nuclear applications.  However, for complete understanding of the steels for nuclear applications, it is first necessary to examine the basic properties of the steels, because that information is necessary as a baseline for understanding the irradiation effects.  Much of the book involves such baseline information with the hope that this information will be of interest to readers beyond those involved in nuclear applications.

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