Word: plante
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...clear that the grounds of the long national debate over nuclear energy have now shifted drastically. For many years the foes of nuclear power, for all their protest rallies, "clamshell alliances" and sit-ins, were very much on the defensive. Their complaints about plant safety had lacked credibility; the exigencies of the nation's energy crisis were unarguable; the fragility and risk, to some degree inherent in many parts of an advanced industrial society, had a common-sense acceptance as inevitable. But the price of progress, like the price of anything, has a ceiling, and for the nuclear power industry...
...time of renewed interest in the case of Karen Silkwood, who was killed in 1974 when her car ran off a road as she was on her way to meet with a reporter to discuss the unsafe handling of highly radioactive plutonium at a Kerr-McGee Corp. plant in Oklahoma. The trial in an $11.5 million suit filed by Silkwood's family against the company is now under way in Oklahoma City...
Whatever the final report, months from now, on what went wrong and how at Three Mile Island, the way in which federal and plant officials seemed to handle the breakdown will not help the industry's image. The trouble was dismissed at first by Jack Herbein, Metropolitan Edison's vice president for power generation, in a memorable engineer's euphemism, as merely "a normal aberration." Reassuring statements spewed from the plant's press spokesmen, sounding as if they were taken right out of the script for the film The China Syndrome, a thriller that depicts nuclear plant officials as placing...
...stock market indicated the public's response. Shares of Columbia Pictures, which gained a publicity bonanza for its movie, soared by $2.74 in two days, to $24.75. Stocks of nuclear power companies declined sharply. General Public Utilities, which owns the damaged plant, dropped 50¢ a share, while the stock of Kerr-McGee plunged...
...transferred from the nuclear chain reaction in the core by the primary loop, turns to steam and drives the turbine that generates electricity. Lacking the steam's push, the turbine automatically shut down. This, said Curry, was regarded by the engineers as a routine mechanical failure that under the plant's safety rules did not have to be immediately reported to state or federal authorities...