Word: coolant
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pregnant women and preschool children living within five miles of Three Mile Island, and thousands of people fled the area. As tension mounted, engineers struggled to cool the reactor's core. There was a genuine danger of a "meltdown," in which the core could drop into the water coolant at the bottom of its chamber, causing a steam explosion that could rupture the 4-ft.-thick concrete walls of the containment building; or the molten core could burn through the even thicker concrete base and deep into the earth. In either case, lethally radioactive gases would be released, causing...
...operators of the plant reduced the size of the bubble by letting the gas dissolve in the reactor's circulating coolant system, then removing them in a chamber outside the reactor...
...riveting entertainment. It is hard to recall a movie of recent years as absorbing, or as much fun, as The China Syndrome. That rather obscure title, by the way, refers to the theoretical destination of a plant's super-hot uranium core if it somehow lost its liquid coolant and burned through the floor, into the earth and onward to China...
...suggested that the plants are unsafe. But engineers from Pennsylvania's Duquesne Light Co., which operates one of the plants, and the Boston firm of Stone and Webster, which designed all five, found a mathematical defect in the computer program used to design some of the plants' coolant pipes so that they would be strong enough to withstand a major earthquake. The firms promptly reported their discovery to the commission. Even though it recognized that the probability of earthquakes in the area is small,* the commission ordered the shutdown until a new analysis could be undertaken...
...accident is possible has dictated safeguards that make the probability of its occurring infinitesimal. Nuclear reactors are enclosed in reinforced-concrete "containment vessels" capable of withstanding tremendous pressures from within. All reactors are equipped with automatic shut-off and multiple back-up systems so that any "loss of coolant" that could start a system on the slope toward a meltdown can be quickly corrected. The NRC maintains resident inspectors at many plants, makes unannounced inspections of others and, as last week's action demonstrates, is willing to shut down a plant for as long as necessary if there...