Word: core
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Those of us who wander across this country -- hard-core itinerants, escapees from a Stanley Elkin fiction, a ragtag of peddlers, truckers, journalists, compulsive tourists -- meet in flyspecked cafes off the interstates and gossip about the cities that are our temporary destinations...
...long as a coolant (water in most reactors) keeps flowing around the reactor core, it carries heat away, and the temperature stays under control. If the coolant is lost, the core begins to overheat, like a car with a broken radiator. The chain reaction promptly ceases because rising temperatures cause the fuel to expand, which increases the distances between individual atoms and makes it less likely that the neutrons emitted by one will hit the nucleus of another. But the spontaneous radioactive decay of nuclei goes on. The uncooled reactor core could eventually get hot enough to melt through...
...MHTGR, in contrast, has no safety cooling system at all; the helium gas flowing through its core merely carries away heat to power electric generators. The reactor itself can never get hot enough to melt down. In the MHTGR, bits of uranium fuel are encapsulated in tiny grains made of carbon and silicon compounds. The fuel particles, which are embedded in racquetball-size "pebbles" of graphite, will remain intact up to 3600 degreesF. But the configuration of the core and the reactor's size (it generates only 80 megawatts of power, compared with 1,000 megawatts for large conventional reactors...
...addition, Hufton could teach Core Curriculumclasses and the introductory course in the plannedWomen's Studies concentration, Clinton said...
...evacuees from Pripyat, the town nearest the plant, will probably never return to their homes. Velikhov said that while radiation levels have dropped sharply about 40 miles from Chernobyl, extensive decontamination measures will be needed to make the immediate vicinity livable. He said the shattered reactor core, which is being entombed in concrete, remains hot beneath the 5,000-ton pile of sand, lead pellets and boron that helicopters have dumped to seal in radiation. Said Velikhov: "I would not like to create the illusion that all our problems are over, but I think that now we do not need...