Word: dangerous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Concerns rose sharply over the safety of residents of Kiev, 80 miles from the disaster, and the surrounding area. Though officials first said the April 26 accident posed no danger to the third largest Soviet city (pop. 2.4 million), Kievans were told last week to wash often and keep their windows closed. They were further warned against eating lettuce and swimming outdoors. In the city, water trucks hosed down streets to wash away radioactive dust, and police conducted spot checks for radiation. Kiev's 250,000 schoolchildren will be let out of classes two weeks early for summer vacation...
Evidence of the danger that people in the Kiev area may be facing came from some distant sources. Experts found surprisingly high radiation levels, for example, in members of a Western Michigan University tour group that had visited Kiev two days after the mishap. Tests by health technicians at a Consumers Power nuclear plant near South Haven, Mich., showed that 14 of the tourists had absorbed almost 1,500 millirems of radiation, or 50 times the amount in a chest X ray. Robert English, corporate health physicist for Consumers Power, said that the Americans faced minimal long-term health hazards...
...accident and for its relative silence on its seriousness. But at the time of the TMI crisis, President Carter certainly wasn't letting us know how bad things were. While federal experts were predicting a hydrogen explosion, the President was telling Harrisburg residents that they weren't in great danger and that an evacuation would be "strictly a precautionary move...
...close range, though, the radiation-bearing plume could be deadly. The immediate danger was, of course, greatest for those nearest the disaster. Said Kerry Dance, president of GA Technologies, a San Diego reactor builder: "The people who are in trouble are those right at the site." Henry Wagner, a professor of radiation health sciences at Johns Hopkins, speculated that local residents risked exposure to extreme doses of radiation that could cause cerebral hemorrhaging, nausea, vomiting and death within hours...
...State Institute for Radiation Hygiene after news reports told of an invisible radioactive cloud over the most densely populated part of Norway. Sample queries: "I am a mother of small children. What measures should I take against the radiation in the air?" "I am pregnant. Are the radiation beams dangerous to the child I am bearing?" Public-health assurances that the radiation was too low to pose a hazard failed to stem the concern. "Mass hysteria in a situation like this is not uncommon," said Are Holen, a catastrophe researcher in Oslo. "We experience a danger that we cannot...