Word: core
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...modify the emergency core-cooling systems (which are designed to pour thousands of gallons of cooling water on a runaway reactor and thereby prevent The China Syndrome-type meltdown that was narrowly averted at Three Mile Island...
...would flush contaminated water through pipes and into the plant's auxiliary building, from which it could leak into the atmosphere. The technicians also point out that the pumps themselves produce heat, and could increase water pressure, cause vibrations or otherwise disturb the reactor's touchy, damaged core. As Robert Bernero, the NRC's on-site decommissioning expert, told TIME Correspondent Peter Stoler: "When you've got a napping tiger, you don't want to rattle its cage...
...only a prelude to the grand finale: a kind of exercise in Yankee ingenuity that the engineers are calling natural circulation. It is an apt name and involves elements of physics taught in grade school. Bypassing the residual heat removal system, the heat will be transported out of the core by free convection-the principle at work when hot water circulates in a simmering teakettle...
...entire secondary loop will be pumped "solid" with water rather than its usual complement of steam and water. Then the primary loop's pumps will be shut off. And lo, what might be called Operation Teakettle will start. Hot water will rise through convection in the reactor's core, and be carried off by a leg of the radioactive-tight primary loop that is already blueprinted as the "hot leg." The water's destination: the steam generator, where it will transfer (exchange, in engineering parlance) much of its heat to the water now flowing in the separated secondary loop. Presumably...
Every degree will be a battle. Even under the best of circumstances, Operation Teakettle will take at least five days to lower the core temperature the final 28° C. But the NRC team is determined not to hurry the process with pumps or other heavy-duty machinery. All in all, the technicians at Three Mile Island are cautiously optimistic. But even after cooldown, their job will not be done. They must still purge the stricken and perhaps permanently wrecked plant of its overburden of frighteningly dangerous radioactivity, a process that could easily go on for months. Then they must figure...