The eutectic temperature of this mixture is .

It was formed by glacial melting at the end of the Ice Age.

Silicon carbide, SiC (carborundum) is a hard, high melting solid and a well known abrasive.

This compound is used as flux in the smelting of secondary aluminium, to reduce or remove the magnesium content of the melt.

The melting point of aluminium, , is typically reached within minutes of the start of a fire.

Assuming a steady rate of discharge, this alone is sufficient to raise global sea levels by 0.2 mm per year.

If the carbon content is over 2 , the metal is called cast iron, because it has a relatively low melting point and is easily cast.

The value of pKw decreases as temperature increases from the melting point of ice to a minimum at c. 250 C, after which it increases up to the critical point of water c. 374 C.

The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.

MADRID Seen from Europe, the irrationality of the political and media discourse over nuclear energy has, if anything, increased and intensified in the year since the meltdown at Japan s Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

A variation on this theme is the use of flux methods, where a salt of relatively low melting point is added to the mixture to act as a high temperature solvent in which the desired reaction can take place.

The single crystal nickel alloy turbine blades are also hollow, and air is pushed through laser drilled holes in them to cool them because the gas temperature is higher than the melting point of the blades.

Fukushima is likely to stunt the appeal of nuclear power in a way similar to the accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, not to mention the far more severe meltdown of the Chernobyl reactor in 1986.

Possibly the energy released by the decay of 60Fe contributed, together with the energy released by decay of the radionuclide 26Al, to the remelting and differentiation of asteroids after their formation 4.6 billion years ago.

The threat posed by the potential reactor meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear power plant is perhaps the starkest demonstration imaginable that we live in an interdependent world, one in which governments must collaborate in novel ways to ensure our health and safety.

But the perfect storm of the largest earthquake and tsunami since industrialization, and the resulting meltdown of three reactor cores at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, went beyond any scenario previously envisaged.