Word: pile
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Waldheim's victory is unlikely to restore his credibility abroad. Indeed, new allegations about the President-elect's shadowy war record continued to pile up last week. A former Yugoslav intelligence officer claimed that after the war he passed along the names of 30 alleged Austrian war criminals to the Soviets as possible agents. Waldheim's name, he said, was on that list. In Washington, debate continued over whether to place Waldheim on a Nazi war- crimes watch list that bars those named from entering the U.S. As head of state, Waldheim will almost certainly be allowed to visit under...
...return to their homes. Velikhov said that while radiation levels have dropped sharply about 40 miles from Chernobyl, extensive decontamination measures will be needed to make the immediate vicinity livable. He said the shattered reactor core, which is being entombed in concrete, remains hot beneath the 5,000-ton pile of sand, lead pellets and boron that helicopters have dumped to seal in radiation. Said Velikhov: "I would not like to create the illusion that all our problems are over, but I think that now we do not need to expect any unpleasant surprises...
...sure knows a pile of plutonium when he sees one, though, and he knows that one this size has no place in the medical research John is pretending to conduct. Obviously, that is just a cover story for experiments with weaponry. And so Paul and Jenny work out a way to nick some plutonium in a manner that wittily combines a sophisticated analysis of the lab's security system with kid-stuff inventiveness (their tools include a toy truck, Frisbees and a bottle of shampoo...
...machines. "It's a crude technology," said a senior Administration official. "They haven't changed it in 30 years." Although capable of producing 1,000 MW of power (vs. 850 MW for a typical U.S. nuclear generator), the Chernobyl unit had some design features dating back to the atomic pile that Enrico Fermi used in 1942 to create the world's first chain reaction at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field. Both systems employed graphite to moderate the nuclear reaction. Most U.S. units regulate with water instead. About half of all Soviet reactors employ graphite rather than water...
...Like the Chernobyl facility, the Windscale Pile No. 1 plutonium-production plant north of Liverpool, England, used graphite to slow down neutrons emitted during nuclear fission. When workers discovered a fire in the reactor, they sprayed it with carbon dioxide but failed to quench the blaze. By the time the fire was put out with water, radioactive material had contaminated 200 sq. mi. of countryside. Officials banned the sale of milk from cows grazing in the area for more than a month. The government estimated that at least 33 cancer deaths could be traced to the effects of the accident...