Word: mw
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Residents of Ontario, N.Y., are used to seeing steam spouting from the stacks of the Robert E. Ginna nuclear-power plant. So they were not excited last week when the 470-MW plant, which serves 320,000 customers in communities near Lake Ontario, once again began sending white plumes into the frigid air. But their calm turned to alarm when cars from local law-enforcement agencies arrived to block the plant's gates, and word spread that county officials were dusting off plans to evacuate surrounding residential areas. After twelve years of accident-free operation, the Ginna plant...
...finances but its technology; the 375-megawatt plant to be built is a breeder reactor, which creates more atomic fuel than it burns. The physics behind this alchemy is not new. A few light bulbs were powered by the first tiny breeder 30 years ago, and a 200-MW breeder plant was fired up-and failed-near Detroit in 1966. Conventional nuclear reactors also create fuel, but about 35% less than they consume, rather than, like breeders, about 20% more. Says A. David Rossin of the American Nuclear Society: "Breeder reactors will be needed. To abandon Clinch River now would...
American officials were not alone last week in expressing doubts that Iraq could have produced materials for nuclear weapons within months of activating the 70-MW Tammuz reactor. That crucial Israeli contention did get some support, but also a lot more detailed criticism, from an impressive array of international nuclear scientists and Western government officials...
...research reactor, scheduled to be activated this summer was intended only to train Iraqi scientists and technicians in nuclear technology. A facility was first discussed in 1974 by then French Premier Jacques Chirac and Iraq's Saddam Hussein. The final agreement led to the erection of the 70-MW reactor at the Tammuz nuclear center in the desert at El-Tuwaitha. It was supported by an 800-kW minireactor, separately housed and untouched by the raid, that was used for minor experiments and to prepare radioactive materials...
...make nuclear weapons its possible production at the Tammuz site was central to the Israelis justification for the raid. The Iraqi-French contract required delivery of 70 kg of 93% enriched U-235 a grade and amount of uranium well suited for making nuclear weapons. In addition the 70-MW Tammuz reactor was 14 times as powerful as most research reactors, and Israeli physicists contend it could have been modified to readily produce weapons-grade plutonium...