Word: nuclearism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Soviet government's first reaction to the 1986 catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear plant was to hide it from the world. Only when confronted with irrefutable evidence did officials admit that one of the plant's reactors had exploded, releasing a radioactive cloud that spread over the country and across Europe...
...claim that a cover-up is still going on. They charge that 1) the accident released at least 20 times more radiation than the government has admitted, 2) Communist officials failed to evacuate nearby towns and cities right away, although they knew of the danger, and 3) the Soviet nuclear establishment had known that the Chernobyl design was unsafe. "I believe we must launch an investigation and learn who was responsible," says Alexei Yablokov, deputy chairman of the Committee on Ecology and the Rational Use of Natural Resources in the Congress of People's Deputies, the new Soviet legislature...
...that the accident released 1 billion or more curies of radiation, rather than the reported figure of 50 million to 80 million -- is denied by the authorities. Says Nikolai Steinberg, former chief engineer of the Chernobyl reactor and now deputy chairman of the State Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Industry: "We're not the only ones who came up with that figure. International scientists were involved as well." U.S. experts support the lower estimate. Nonetheless, Yablokov and other deputies have demanded that the Chernobyl installation, which is still operating, be closed down completely...
Soviet legislators say officials knew the nuclear plant was unsound and that the truth about the disaster -- including bungled relief efforts -- is still being concealed...
...Somewhere between Oak Ridge, Tenn., and two manufacturers in England, a total of five grams (0.175 oz.) of radioactive tritium had vanished without a trace. What made the disappearance especially alarming was that the quantity of tritium involved was sufficient, when combined with other ingredients, to build a small nuclear weapon. The U.S. Department of Energy, sensitive to the dangers of nuclear proliferation, last July halted U.S. sales of the gas and moved quickly to explain the losses and assure the public that the missing tritium had not ended up in the hands of a terrorist state...