Word: melt
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...straitjacket." Last April the Arizona stretch of the Colorado was named "the most endangered river of 1991" by American Rivers, a Washington-based conservation group. A prolonged drought in the U.S. Southwest, now in its fifth year, has dealt the Colorado a double whammy. Less snow to melt at its sources means less water coursing downriver; reduced rainfall elsewhere means even greater demands on the diminished flow...
...American nationality was inescapably English in language, ideas and institutions. The pot did not melt everybody, not even all the white immigrants; deeply bred racism put black Americans, yellow Americans, red Americans and brown Americans well outside the pale. Still, the infusion of other stocks, even of nonwhite stocks, and the experience of the New World reconfigured the British legacy and made the U.S., as we all know, a very different country from Britain...
...nuclear reactors work by splitting large atoms into smaller pieces, producing heat. The danger is that the nuclear fuel, unless properly cooled, can overheat and melt through containment walls, releasing radioactivity into the environment. Most commercial reactors guard against meltdown by ensuring that the fuel is always surrounded by circulating coolant, usually ordinary / water. But what if a pipe bursts and the water is lost? Or if the water boils off? To prevent such mishaps, today's reactors have backup systems and backups to the backups. But no matter how many layers of redundancy are built into a conventional reactor...
...grains of enriched uranium that are coated in ceramic and embedded in billiard ball-size "pebbles" of graphite. The reactor needs no safety cooling system; helium gas flowing through the core simply carries away heat to power a turbine. Even if all the gas escaped, the core could not melt down. Lawrence Lidsky, an M.I.T. professor of nuclear engineering, calls such reactors "inherently safe" because they rely on the laws of nature rather than human intervention to prevent a major accident...
...Sciences issued a long-awaited report on global warming -- the theory that a buildup of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is causing temperatures to climb, threatening crops and coastal areas that could be drowned under rising oceans if the polar ice caps melt. Though both sides could find some support for their positions in the study, its findings and recommendations could prod the go-slow faction in the White House...