Word: chernobyls
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There were other signs of runaway corruption. The party had a colossal 1991 deficit of 1 billion rubles on a budget of 2.5 billion rubles. One party source charged that a 500 million-ruble fund for the children of Chernobyl was diverted by local party committees to their...
Remarkably enough, the nuclear building program has withstood the two great shocks of the atomic era. The 1979 near meltdown at Three Mile Island spawned new safety regulations. The catastrophe at Chernobyl in 1986 set off a public outcry in most of Western Europe, forcing some governments to curtail nuclear programs -- but not France. Five reactors will be added to the national grid in this decade. The Superphenix fast-breeder reactor, a joint venture with Italy and Germany, is working, though it has been dogged by technical problems and will never recover its $4.5 billion development cost...
...first real President, the Baltic republics were going about their own democratic business. In Estonia, four anticommunist parties pushed for legislation to break up collective farms and convert them into private plots. In Latvia, parliamentarians vigorously debated emergency health care for local soldiers who helped clean up the Chernobyl disaster five years ago. In Lithuania, the Supreme Council passed a new social-welfare bill that will require raising taxes...
Many key plant managers and technicians at Chernobyl knew nothing about nuclear technology. Patronage held sway over professionalism when it came to filling top jobs that carried prestige and good pay. The accident, ironically, occurred during a safety exercise, when incompetent managers exposed the core, depriving it of vital cooling water...
What Medvedev calls the "conspiracy of silence" that had cloaked the Soviet nuclear power program in secrecy and lies for 35 years added to the human and environmental cost. In a country where nuclear accidents had never been reported, the pressure to cover up the monumental disaster at Chernobyl was enormous. Plant managers misinformed government officials, insisting that the reactor was intact. Even as the radioactive cloud was spreading over thousands of square miles of Europe, Soviet bureaucrats were still denying the accident. At the same time, Moscow bosses quashed early requests by Chernobyl officials to evacuate the area, dooming...