Word: meltdowns
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...diagram). The trouble seems to have begun Saturday, April 26, when a mishap caused a loss of the water that continuously cools the uranium fuel rods in the reactor's core. With the coolant gone, superheated steam could have triggered ) a series of irreversible reactions leading to a meltdown of the fuel and a blast that ripped through the roof of the building that housed Unit...
Though the accident was a type of core meltdown, the ultimate nuclear power nightmare, U.S. experts also called it a burnup. Meltdowns technically occur in reactors containing pools of water. When the water boils away, the molten core sinks into the earth in the so-called China syndrome, a term used by scientists, and popularized by the 1979 movie of the same name, that mordantly suggests that the radioactive mass might plunge all the way through the earth. The Chernobyl plant had no such pool, by contrast, and engineers expect the reactor to be consumed by intense heat...
Publicly, however, Moscow describes its nuclear generators as thoroughly up < to date. In an article on Chernobyl in the February 1986 issue of Soviet Life, an English-language publication, Ukrainian Power Minister Vitali Sklyarov boasted that "the odds of a meltdown are one in 10,000 years." In any case, he added, "the environment is also securely protected...
Outside the Soviet Union, the Chernobyl meltdown is likely to cast a long global shadow. "Chernobyl will reanimate the entire nuclear debate in Western Europe," said Thomas Roser of Bonn's Atomforum. "All the people who object to nuclear power will have this week's disaster as a symbol...
...between protesters and police have long been common. Says Dieter Kersting, a leading opponent of plans to build a fuel-reprocessing facility in a forest clearing near the Bavarian town of Wackersdorf: "The Chernobyl catastrophe clearly strengthens our position." Noting that officials have consistently called the chances of a meltdown virtually nil, Kersting added, "Who can believe those assertions...