Word: moltenly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...based in Vienna. Its three top officials were allowed to fly over the site of the accident. Morris Rosen, the director of the agency's division of nuclear | safety, declared at week's end that the uncontrolled fire at the plant's No. 4 reactor was out, though the molten mass continued to smolder. He also confirmed that the Soviets were tunneling beneath the reactor in an attempt to seal off the damaged unit from below with concrete, thus protecting the underlying ground and water table. Rosen called the effort the first step in a plan to "entomb" the entire...
Fueled by the white-hot graphite core of one of Chernobyl's four reactors, the runaway blaze burned at temperatures of up to 5000 degrees , or twice that of molten steel. The crippled reactor itself was unapproachable--too hot from the fire ravaging it, too dangerous radioactively. "No one knows how to stop it," said one U.S. expert. "It could take weeks to burn itself...
Though the accident was a type of core meltdown, the ultimate nuclear power nightmare, U.S. experts also called it a burnup. Meltdowns technically occur in reactors containing pools of water. When the water boils away, the molten core sinks into the earth in the so-called China syndrome, a term used by scientists, and popularized by the 1979 movie of the same name, that mordantly suggests that the radioactive mass might plunge all the way through the earth. The Chernobyl plant had no such pool, by contrast, and engineers expect the reactor to be consumed by intense heat...
Solid though it appears, the earth's crust is composed of a dozen large plates and several smaller ones, ranging in thickness from 20 to 150 miles. The plates are in constant motion, riding on the molten mantle below and normally traveling at the pace of a millimeter a week, equivalent to the growth rate of a fingernail. Geophysicist Bill Spence of the U.S. Geological Survey in Colorado says, "They're just like a mobile jigsaw puzzle." The plates' travels result in continental drift, the formation of mountains, volcanoes--and earthquakes...
...Bartha in Glass by Galle (Abrams; 223 pages; $40) were often adorned with images of flowers, insects, birds, drawn from Galle's extensive nature studies, or abstractly patterned by pieces of colored glass. Jade, amber, even emeralds and sapphires were reproduced by adding metallic oxides and salts to molten glass. The designer went on to produce other decorative objects, including inlaid furniture, but Galle's reputation rests on glass works that were revolutionary in his time and still retain their ability to astonish and delight...