Word: obninsk
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...estimated 375 commercial nuclear power plants in operation around the world have now built up more than 3,800 years of experience. But since the first one went on-line at Obninsk in the Soviet Union in 1954, there has always been the fear of an accident. The vast majority of malfunctions pose no serious health threat, yet some problems have required emergency measures. A worldwide count of accidents and casualties at nuclear facilities cannot be made with precision because the Soviet Union, a major user of nuclear power, does not divulge information about such problems until they become impossible...
...Beloyarsk in the Urals. They plan to build even more of these reactors, which, to the joy of power planners and the dismay of many others, produce more plutonium than they consume. Indeed, Mikhail Troyanov, a well-respected and tough-minded physicist who serves as deputy director of the Obninsk laboratory, predicts that after 1990 breeders will be the backbone of the Soviet energy system. Says he: "I don't see any difficulties in going to plutonium...
...Russians also found it difficult to understand the resistance in the U.S. to the construction of nuclear power plants, especially the breeder type, which produces more atomic fuel than it consumes. The Soviets now have one small experimental breeder at Obninsk and another, much larger, 600,000-kw. plant at Beloyarskoye; none of their six nuclear power plants now in full operation has had a serious accident. Proud of their own safety procedures, they dismissed as useless the American practice of enclosing nuclear reactors in large protective shells; "Purely psychological," said Igor Morokhov, No. 2 man of the Soviet atomic...
...Zhores Medvedev's case, that directive was followed so literally that the precise nature of events-not to say Medvedev's "malady"-was a secret from everybody but the state. In May 1970, he was summoned to the Obninsk Psychiatric Clinic, not far from Moscow, under the pretext of attending a consultation about his son, a teenager with hippie tendencies. While waiting in a small room at a nurse's request, Medvedev looked out of a window and saw his son leaving the hospital grounds. When he turned to go, Medvedev found the door of the room...
After that book was published, Medvedev was fired from his job as head of the Obninsk radiological institute, 35 miles southwest of Moscow. Unable to find another job, he set about writing a calm, straightforward survey of the restrictions, censorship, and surveillance that oppress many Soviet intellectuals. This work too found its way to the West via samizdat (literally "self-publishing"), the literary underground. It was his authorship of that book, published in the U.S. this week by St. Martin's Press as The Medvedev Papers, which led directly to Medvedev's forced hospitalization last year...