Word: plante
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tries to unscramble the reasons for the near-catastrophe. Wells's boss kills her story, and locks the film in the vault, but she keeps trying--unsuccessfully--to convince him to let her do hard news. Adams, meanwhile, steals the film to figure out what really happened at the plant and get the story out. As in any good thriller, these three stories become increasingly intertwined and finally come together in the film's roaring climax...
...FILM'S TITLE, incidentally, comes from nuclear engineers' jargon for the worst of all possible accidents at a nuclear power plant. If the level of the water circulating around the hot reactor core drops far enough that the core is uncovered, the heat of the reaction melts the steel containment vessel. Then the reactor itself sinks through the plant's floor, into the ground and, in theory, "all the way to China." In reality, it hits ground water first, and sends clouds of radioactive steam shooting into the atmosphere, killing or contaminating everything for miles around. Not a pleasant thought...
...rest of the cast, including Douglas, have parts that offer little depth of characterization. Douglas breezes through his role as an angry Vietnam vet-turned-freelance cameraman. The utitility company executives are all shown as thoroughly evil, motivated only by greed, while Godell's fellow technicians at the plant simply take orders--until well after the critical moment...
...careened off a country road in Oklahoma and crumpled against a culvert. Its sole occupant lay dead, surrounded by a litter of papers she had been carrying. Karen Silkwood, 28, a lab technician in a plant producing fuel rods for nuclear reactors, had been driving to meet a New York Times reporter. She hoped to document her charges that officials at the installation, owned by the Kerr-McGee Corp., had continually and carelessly exposed their employees to one of the world's most dangerous metals: plutonium. But after the car was towed from the ditch, the papers could...
Instead, the trial will center on a fact not in dispute: that Silkwood had been exposed to enough plutonium to make her fear that she might be dying. The courtroom clash will come over just how that contamination occurred and whether it meant that the plant was negligent in handling the potent metal, which is used in atomic weapons. Plutonium is considered some 20,000 times more deadly than the venom from a cobra if ingested, and even minute quantities can cause cancer years later. As testimony opened in a federal court in Oklahoma City last week, Dr. John Gofman...