Word: plants
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...obstinance condemned people everywhere to fragmentary and often conflicting accounts that tended to shift abruptly as new facts became known. Not until the weekend did a Soviet official come forth with the beginnings of a straightforward account. Boris Yletsin, a candidate-member of the Politburo, said reservoirs near the plant were contaminated and the area remained too radioactive for residents to return. In remarks to the West German television network ARD, Yletsin said of the accident, "The cause lies apparently in the subjective realm, in human error. We are undertaking measures to make sure that this doesn't happen again...
...Soviet Union, the consequences of Chernobyl could be devastating. Anywhere from two to 2,000 people near the plant were reported to have been killed by causes ranging from the initial blast to lethal radiation, and tens of thousands may have been evacuated from the endangered region. Meanwhile, radioactive gases and particles have spread over a vast section of the Soviet breadbasket in the Ukraine, and water supplies for the more than 6 million inhabitants of the Kiev area are threatened with contamination. Milk from local cows will probably be tainted for months to come...
...nuclear reactor fire burning out of control in the gentle, rolling Ukrainian countryside and steadily releasing radiation into the air. That makes the catastrophe unimaginably worse than the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, where a containment building kept most radioactive material from escaping out of the plant. The Chernobyl unit, by contrast, lacked such a protective structure...
...radiation created, the Soviets insisted that only two people had died. When some Western papers carried increasingly sensational but unconfirmed accounts of the reactor's condition, TASS reported that the fire was under control. At week's end the official Soviet news agency buttressed earlier claims of the plant's safety by reporting that Politburo Members Nikolai Ryzhkov and Yegor Ligachev had toured the damaged facility...
...water boils away, the molten core sinks into the earth in the so-called China syndrome, a term used by scientists, and popularized by the 1979 movie of the same name, that mordantly suggests that the radioactive mass might plunge all the way through the earth. The Chernobyl plant had no such pool, by contrast, and engineers expect the reactor to be consumed by intense heat...