Word: decays
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ivan Yemilianov, a senior designer of the stricken unit, said Soviet engineers planned to entomb the reactor in concrete for hundreds of years to allow the radioactive substances to decay. The scheme will require workers to pump an insulating layer of liquid-nitrogen refrigerant into a tunnel just beneath the reactor. The crippled unit will then be encased within a concrete barrier that will descend 96 ft. into the ground. Engineers were also spreading a plastic film over some 300,000 sq. yds. of soil a day to prevent further contamination and hold tainted earth in place...
...wondering where you are. Analog is a return to a certain harmony that the digital world chops away. Thus analog is able to capture qualities that digital never will. Only the LP, concludes Rothstein after truly heroic experimentation, can convey, say, the piano's quality of "attack and decay...
...explosion followed by a severe fire. He said the reactor was undergoing maintenance and operating at only 7% of its power when the mishap occurred. The blast halted all chain reactions in the unit's core, Rosen said, but it remained hot because the radioactive fuel continued to decay...
...first began to come into the spotlight in 1976, with the appearance of an article by Zhores Medvedev, an exiled Soviet biologist now living in London. In it, he claimed that the Soviets had carelessly stored radioactive wastes in shallow burial facilities. As the debris accumulated, he wrote, radioactive decay caused the material to overheat and, finally, to erupt like a volcano. The first response to this assertion was pronounced skepticism, even among Western experts. The CIA said there had been nothing but a minor accident, and the chairman of Britain's Atomic Energy Authority dismissed the theory...
...damage to the earth around Chernobyl was probably equally severe. Up to 60 sq. mi. of Soviet farmland is likely to remain severely contaminated for decades, unless steps are taken to remove the tainted topsoil. Reason: cesium 137 and strontium 90, two radioactive particles spewed by the blaze, decay very slowly. It could take decades for the ground to be free of them. Together with the shorter-lived iodine 131, the substances promise to pose short- and long-term problems for people, crops and animals. Says James Warf, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California: "I wouldn...