Word: leveler
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...outcome and the precise causes of the failure at 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?...
...know," replied Metropolitan Edison President Walter Creitz when reporters persisted. The first estimate came from William Dornsife, a nuclear engineer who had flown in the state helicopter. He put the radiation reading taken downwind from the plant at 1 millirem per hour?not an alarming or unalarming level. By 3 in the afternoon, Creitz put the reading at 2 to 3 millirems per hour, measured at the outer edge of the 200-acre plant site on the island...
...from the nearby headquarters of the NRC in King of Prussia reported later in the day that radio activity had been detected as far as 16 miles from the plant, and claimed that radiation within the reactor containment building had risen to a startling 1,000 times its normal level. At one point operators in the nearby control room had to put on protective gas masks...
...Thompson, an executive officer of the NRC: "We are in a situation that is not a situation we have ever been in before." As officials studied the complex hazard, they discovered yet another ominous possibility: if the amount of hydrogen in the reactor kept growing, it could reach a level at which only a spark would be needed to set off a hydrogen-gas explosion. If the explosion were powerful enough, the core vessel might rupture and the concrete walls of the container building might break, exposing the surrounding area to the reactor's escaping radioactivity. One NRC official...
...this trilogy, history and value remain central themes. The first volume of the trilogy picks up where Liang Ch'i-ch'ao left off, taking "the problem of intellectual continuity," the persistence of ideas in changing contexts in space and time, to a society-wide level. No longer tied to the life of a single man, Levenson dispensed with conventions of narrative history, choosing instead to write three books as a web, jumping centuries and cultures to find the comparisons that would treat the same theme from a myriad of settings. From treating crises of intellectuals in an intellectual system...