Word: chernobyls
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nevertheless, ensuring a stable and prosperous Russia is of vital interest to the whole world. The republics have more than 2 million soldiers, a score of Chernobyl clones, the potential to flood Poland and Germany with hundreds of thousands of refugees -- and to become a big market and political partner if things work out right. But with recession gripping the West, generosity comes hard, especially when donors fear that Russia's economic chaos will simply swallow up limitless funds...
...often paralyzed economic reform. Because Russia cut off fuel supplies for much of the summer, reserves in Lithuania have run alarmingly low. The country also relies on the dangerously designed Ignalina nuclear-power plant for virtually all its electrical energy; several minor accidents have sparked fears of another Chernobyl. Angered by rising prices and political gridlock, voters were ready to give another chance to Algirdas Brazauskas, the Communist Party chief who broke with Moscow in 1989 and supported independence...
...handling of Chernobyl is hardly reassuring. When workers finished the huge steel-and-concrete shell that entombs the intensely radioactive mass of the shattered No. 4 reactor in late 1986, Soviet officials declared the site safe for at least 30 years. Yet today the sarcophagus is cracked, crumbling and in peril of a disastrous collapse. The melted-down fuel is turning to unstable dust. Contaminated objects are being smuggled out of the poorly guarded 1,092-sq.-mi. exclusion zone. Birds fly into the sarcophagus through holes as big as a garage door; rats breed in the ruin. The structure...
...environmental nightmares strike a more frightening chord than Chernobyl. It is not merely the radioactive mess left by the 1986 meltdown. Six years later, 19 similar graphite-moderated nuclear time bombs are still ticking away, alarming relics of a badly designed, haplessly run nuclear-power program that none of the independent republics of the former Soviet Union can afford to shut down. The potential killers bring light, heat and power to parts of Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania, where their immediate decommissioning would create unacceptable economic disruption and even civil unrest...
...Aside from Chernobyl, our first priority is drinking water,'' 80 percent of which is polluted, he said...