Word: reactor
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Milne, who passed around a sample of material he said would be about the same size as the irradiated material shipped to MIT's Albany St. nuclear reactor, assured councilors that there was no danger of environemtnal contamination from the shipments, which he said would not exceed 10 or 20 curies...
Councilors had grown worried about the possibility of large-scale shipments of radioactive materials this fall after they learned that the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had granted MIT a license to store as much as a million curies worth of radioactivity at the reactor facility...
...reactor operations director Lincoln Clark said recently that the MIT reactor, which has been in operation for more than two decades, is not powerful enough to irradiate metals easily for the testing...
...compilation is essentially a fuckup-by-fuckup account of what went wrong, and each goof is more chilling than the next. Consider the moments after a valve first failed and the "incident" began--operators feverishly leaf through Emergency Procedure (EP) notebooks, searching for a way to bring the reactor back to stability. The operators don't need a college degree, nor any training in engineering. They need to pass 14 hours of exams designed to test their knowledge of the EPs. Needless to say, no one had thought to design an EP for the accident unfolding at Three Mile Island...
Later, even once men with strings of degrees arrived on the scene, things were little better. A bubble of hydrogen formed near the dome of the reactor, and there was general fear that it might explode or expand enough to push away the reactor coolant and expose the core. Everyone worried, but no one knew what to do--as one NRC official said, "We have got every systems engineer we can find... thinking the problem, and they are not coming up with answers... We don't have a solution, but maybe we are coming up with one." And maybe...