Word: megawatts
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With only a little time before your bus is due to arrive to carry you back north, you walk along the Washington streets. The sun is down now, but the sky is still deepening, an electric blue background for a postcard-pretty, 1000-megawatt Capitol dome. Your legs ache a little, and you feel drained, peaceful in the night air. For a second, staring at the brilliant white Capitol dome, you feel a pang of--nah, really? You?--patriotism. It's getting late. Some kids are running across the courtyard below the Capitol building, brandishing sticks and hollering away...
Each 1000 megawatt reactor (the planned Boston Edison Pilgrim II plant will be 1180 megawatts) produces as much high-level waste as 1000 Hiroshima-sized bombs each and every year. There are over 28 different radioactive substances routinely emitted from these nuclear reactors, all of which are ecologically dangerous and some of which, such as strontium-90 and cesium-131, will be a disposal problem for 600 to 1000 years. The most deadly emission, of course, is plutonium. Its lethality is such that one-millionth of a gram is sufficient to cause lung cancer--and a large reactor annually produces...
...battle. France has no oil and very little coal, and the 1973 Arab oil boycott dramatically demonstrated French reliance on foreign energy. Since 1974, as a result, the government has organized an ambitious atomic-energy program to provide at least 40 conventional nuclear-power plants and a 1,200-megawatt fast-neutron plant that will breed plutonium fuel from uranium wastes, reducing any necessity for importing North American uranium. Scientists are sharply divided over the dangers that may be inherent in the breeder reactors, and President Carter has halted the U.S. breeder program as risky. The French are nonetheless pressing...
...northern Westchester in the vicinity of the Indian Point No. 3 nuclear power plant overlooking the Hudson River. At 8:37 p.m., according to Con Ed's preliminary analysis, flashes of lightning knocked out two 345-kilovolt lines. That immediately cut off all the electricity from the 900-megawatt Indian Point facility, and the nuclear plant was promptly and safely shut down. Then, while duty officers at Con Ed's main control center in Manhattan-a huge, display-filled room somewhat like Mission Control in Houston-scrambled to make up for the power loss, lightning struck again...
Seabrook, New Hampshire is a town of 5700 people situated on the Atlantic coast just north of Massachusetts. In August 1976 construction of two large, 1150-megawatt nuclear reactors began on a piece of Seabrook land once used as an Indian burial ground. Now more than 40 acres of marshland has been filled in and covered with warehouses, guard buildings and a cement factory...