Word: cores
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...seeped sporadically into the atmosphere from the plant. Pennsylvania Governor Richard Thornburgh advised the evacuation of all 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...
...Three Mile Island are known. By the company's own version of events, there were at least five equipment breakdowns?of valves, pumps and fuel rods. Moreover, the engineers should have been able to cool the reactor to a safe level within twelve hours. Only after the reactor core has fully cooled and the abnormal radiation levels within the container building have been reduced will investigators be able to pinpoint the sequence of mechanical failure, as well as any human mistakes that might have been made. On that issue?human error?there are contradictory statements as well...
...safety systems of the Three Mile Island nuclear generating plant malfunctioned resulting in the country's worst civilian nuclear accident. Radiation leaked into the surrounding area and for several days a core meltdown seemed imminent. Besides being a confirmation of the worst fears of nuclear power's foes, Three Mile Island may also mark the end of nuclear power as The Alternative to coal and oil. Though it seems unlikely that a federal ban on nuclear power plants will come out of any subsequent investigations, local governments and citizens' groups will have a lot of ammunition to use against power...
...attitudes. One of its favorite projects of the 1960s was the community mental-health movement. That plan to bring psychiatric services to the deprived went hand in hand with a consensus among psychiatrists that state hospitals should be emptied of all but the most intractable and dangerous hard-core patients. The hospitals were jammed and poorly funded in most states. The idea was compelling: since psychiatric hospitals could presumably do little more than store patients, those who responded to the new antipsychotic medication could be released to their families and treated as outpatients. Under the Community Mental Health Center...
...shows that such safety features work. In 1975, a workman using a candle to test for air leaks accidentally started an electrical fire in the Browns Ferry nuclear plant at Athens, Ala. The fire short-circuited cables controlling the primary cooling system, causing loss of some of the nuclear-core cooling water. But nothing even close to a meltdown ensued. Although one of the back-up cooling systems was also disabled, technicians used other emergency circuits to cool the reactor down long before the situation approached the critical stage...