Word: plutonium
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Every time it happens it seems a bit like the beginning of doomsday. And it happened again at 6 p.m. last Sunday: an alarm shrilled, lights flashed in the control room. A monitor was signaling that the water cooling the plutonium- producing N reactor at Hanford, Wash., had dropped below acceptable levels. Shutdown...
...Nuclear Industries, which operates the reactor. "There wasn't a low-flow problem." And so, on Monday evening, technicians started "pulling rods" as the first step in starting the machine up again. Not for long, though. This week the N reactor, which produces nearly one-third of all U.S. plutonium, will be shut off again, for at least six months, for a long-overdue safety overhaul. Washington Governor Booth Gardner says he is "pleased" with the move, as are local environmentalists. But some citizens, already worried by the October closing of two smaller plutonium plants at Hanford, are concerned about...
...first Hanford reactor was built in 1943, amid the remote sand and sagebrush near the juncture of the Snake and Columbia rivers, to provide plutonium for the bomb destined to destroy Nagasaki. The N reactor (its predecessors have all gone to their last great fission in the sky) dates back 23 years -- and was designed to last only 20. The parts are worn, the pumps and wiring often fail, the whole reactor conks out 20 to 25 times a year. The graphite casing that holds the nuclear rods is swelling by nearly an inch a year, and will collide with...
...internal auditor for Rockwell International, one of eight contractors involved in running the plant, charged that there had been 54 critical safety lapses over the past two years at the two plants that provided fuel for the reactor. The worst of these occurred on Sept. 29, when workmen moving plutonium liquid from one container to another failed to shut off some adjoining pipes -- an oversight that could have led to a chain reaction. The Government closed both plants in early October...
...story appeared in London's Sunday Times under the banner headline REVEALED: THE SECRETS OF ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR ARSENAL. The account told how an Israeli research team, starting in 1964 with a 26-megawatt nuclear reactor supplied by France, secretly upgraded it to 150 megawatts, large enough to produce plutonium for ten nuclear bombs a year. In the process, said the article, they turned Israel into the world's sixth largest nuclear power, after the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China...