Word: blaze
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...some 36 hours passed before the evacuation of the 49,000 residents in the vicinity of Pripyat, the settlement that houses power station workers, their families and others. Shcherbina said that the accident probably started with a chemical explosion. He also revealed that two fire fighters died battling the blaze in Unit No. 4, and 18 of the 204 people hospitalized with radiation sickness since the accident were in grave condition...
...transformed from the near non-event of early versions into an occasion for heroism. Flames leaped so high after the initial explosion, the newspaper Izvestiya reported, that fire fighters had to climb to the 90-ft.-high roof of an adjoining building to aim their hoses down on the blaze. "Every step taken by the fire fighters in their battle against the flames was incredibly difficult," the account continued, "because of the hell-like heat from the melting surface" of the asphalt roof. The following day a 1,100-bus convoy that stretched 13 miles took...
Fueled by the white-hot graphite core of one of Chernobyl's four reactors, the runaway blaze burned at temperatures of up to 5000 degrees , or twice that of molten steel. The crippled reactor itself was unapproachable--too hot from the fire ravaging it, too dangerous radioactively. "No one knows how to stop it," said one U.S. expert. "It could take weeks to burn itself...
...damage to the earth around Chernobyl was probably equally severe. Up to 60 sq. mi. of Soviet farmland is likely to remain severely contaminated for decades, unless steps are taken to remove the tainted topsoil. Reason: cesium 137 and strontium 90, two radioactive particles spewed by the blaze, decay very slowly. It could take decades for the ground to be free of them. Together with the shorter-lived iodine 131, the substances promise to pose short- and long-term problems for people, crops and animals. Says James Warf, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California: "I wouldn...
...Like the Chernobyl facility, the Windscale Pile No. 1 plutonium-production plant north of Liverpool, England, used graphite to slow down neutrons emitted during nuclear fission. When workers discovered a fire in the reactor, they sprayed it with carbon dioxide but failed to quench the blaze. By the time the fire was put out with water, radioactive material had contaminated 200 sq. mi. of countryside. Officials banned the sale of milk from cows grazing in the area for more than a month. The government estimated that at least 33 cancer deaths could be traced to the effects of the accident...