Word: coolant
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...accidental launch of a nuclear missile. Nuclear power plants could be vulnerable to the same difficulties. Last year, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission looked at the Seabrook plant in New Hampshire, it found that Y2K problems, unless fixed, would affect the computers that monitored such crucial functions as reactor-coolant levels and fuel-handling systems...
...wasn't its worst, either. Lately, the 11-year-old ship has been falling apart at an alarming rate, and the cash-poor Russians have been unable to do much about it. In March, its oxygen system failed; soon after, its gyroscopes quit; and three weeks ago, an ongoing coolant leak caused temperatures to rise to an oven-like 88[degrees...
Lately, however, those failures have become nearly intolerable. After the fire, the crew had to live in gas masks for two days until Mir's air was breathable. When the coolant system failed, the station had to be rotated like a pig on a spit to keep it from overheating in the sun. In April, Congress began work on a budgetary amendment that would require NASA to certify Mir's safety before more Americans go aloft. Russia appears to realize that it will either have to scuttle the ship or invest the money to fix it properly. While Moscow...
During the spring outage, a valve was accidentally left open, spilling 12,000 gal. of reactor-coolant water--a blunder that further shook Galatis' faith. He began to see problems almost everywhere he looked and proposed the creation of a global-issues task force to find out whether Millstone was safe enough to go back online. His bosses agreed. But when the head of the task force left for a golf vacation a few weeks before the plant was scheduled to start up, Galatis says, he knew it wasn't a serious effort. So he made a call to Ernest...
...physicists and to the magnets that levitate superfast trains called maglevs and enable them to glide above their tracks. To do the job, however, these superconductors must be kept at very low temperatures (around 4 degreesK) through the use of liquid helium, an expensive and hard-to-handle coolant. The goal of current research is to produce superconductors that can perform their magic at less frigid temperatures that are easier to reach and maintain. What's exciting about the latest mercury compounds, Chu points out, is that they can theoretically do their thing with the help of ordinary coolants like...