Word: chernobyls
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MOSCOW--Officials in charge of cleaning up the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster plan to start up two of the power plant's four reactors in October, local Communist Party official Alexander Domanyuk said yesterday...
...France, nuclear power produces 65% of the country's electricity, and it is solidly backed by Socialist President Francois Mitterrand and Conservative Prime Minister Jacques Chirac. Nonetheless, the French government has been forced to admit that radiation levels from Chernobyl were much higher than originally thought, and some farmers in the eastern part of the country have had to plow under tainted lettuce and cabbage crops. On Wednesday, Paris announced that five workers at a reprocessing plant at Cap de la Hague had accidentally received from .7 to 18 rems of radiation over their bodies. Five rems a year...
Moscow, of course, has many Chernobyl troubles in addition to the damage caused by the blast and radiation. It suffers from a serious credibility gap as a result of its lack of candor about the accident. Other nations have severely criticized the Soviets for first concealing the disaster from the world and then providing scant information. Many Soviet citizens are also resentful because they were not warned of the danger until more than a week after the accident. Residents of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev, 80 miles from the crippled reactor, took no safety precautions in the same period. Many...
While diplomats try to gauge the political effects of Chernobyl, nuclear experts have renewed their search for safer atomic power systems. Many engineers and scientists argue that well-designed existing reactors are safe by any reasonable standards, but others insist that it will take a new generation of machines to ease people's fears and restore their confidence. "Chernobyl was the Hindenburg of the current nuclear power business," says Lawrence Lidsky, an M.I.T. nuclear engineer, referring to the 1937 explosion of a German dirigible that ended the use of hydrogen in lighter- than-air passenger craft. "People simply...
However safe they may prove to be, such designs will probably not be ready for wide-scale use before the turn of the century. Meanwhile, politicians, no less than engineers, will have to confront people's nuclear fears. Having argued for so long that nightmares like Chernobyl could virtually never happen, experts must now live with all the fallout from that historic accident...