Word: core
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...facilities are safer than Soviet ones in other ways. Unlike Soviet nuclear reactors, all NRC-licensed American installations are equipped with emergency core-cooling systems. These usually work by dumping tons of water into any reactor core that shows signs of overheating. Nor are U.S. reactors as likely to release radiation into the atmosphere in the event that the fuel starts melting. Only the newest of the Soviet Union's Western-style reactors are equipped with the steel-reinforced concrete containment buildings that are designed to hold in radioactive gases and the other by-products of an accident. All licensed...
Fueled by the white-hot graphite core of one of Chernobyl's four reactors, the runaway blaze burned at temperatures of up to 5000 degrees , or twice that of molten steel. The crippled reactor itself was unapproachable--too hot from the fire ravaging it, too dangerous radioactively. "No one knows how to stop it," said one U.S. expert. "It could take weeks to burn itself...
...experts in Moscow and elsewhere were gradually piecing together the probable sequence of events that led to disaster (see diagram). The trouble seems to have begun Saturday, April 26, when a mishap caused a loss of the water that continuously cools the uranium fuel rods in the reactor's core. With the coolant gone, superheated steam could have triggered ) a series of irreversible reactions leading to a meltdown of the fuel and a blast that ripped through the roof of the building that housed Unit...
Though the accident was a type of core meltdown, the ultimate nuclear power nightmare, U.S. experts also called it a burnup. Meltdowns technically occur in reactors containing pools of water. When the water boils away, the molten core sinks into the earth in the so-called China syndrome, a term used by scientists, and popularized by the 1979 movie of the same name, that mordantly suggests that the radioactive mass might plunge all the way through the earth. The Chernobyl plant had no such pool, by contrast, and engineers expect the reactor to be consumed by intense heat...
...cornerstone of his drive to double the size of the Soviet economy by the year 2000. Thirty-four new nuclear plants are under construction. The plants are needed all the more because Soviet oil reserves are dwindling. Still, the disaster will inevitably delay new construction, particularly of graphite-core units. "This comes at a bad time for them psychologically," said a Western specialist in Moscow, "since there's been so much talk about speeding up productive processes...