Word: reactor
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...since the accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, more people have been calling the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) information office to find out about the nuclear research reactor at MIT in Cambridge's backyard...
...republics or along the Florida gold coast, Fabian's mobile VanHome is seldom without its lady for the evening. Adolescents, sophisticates, even transsexuals are all given equal time. Yet the warning sign on Fabian's van says more about its owner than about the alarm system: SELF-REACTOR: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. In this picaresque, passion is reserved for the playing field. Despite his experiments with sex and drugs, Fabian truly gets high on Fabian. With characteristic insouciance, the author describes his hero's liaisons: "He found himself selecting, isolating, soliciting partners as transient and avid as himself...
Unfortunately for the beleaguered utility, its film may now need some editing. For the past four months, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), among others, has been looking into the causes and effects of the nation's worst commercial reactor accident. Last week, in a report that is sure to have wide repercussions, NRC staff investigators said that the most serious aspects of the mishap were almost certainly due to human error. And though they acknowledged that the radiation level was low, they said that one burst was greater than any previously revealed...
Some two inches thick and based on many hours of hearings, the NRC report will be some comfort to those who design and build reactors used to generate electricity. It states categorically that although the Pennsylvania plant was not "fail-safe," its equipment and emergency procedures "were adequate to have prevented the serious consequences of the accident, if they had been permitted to function or be carried out as planned." Trouble is, neither the equipment nor the preprogrammed safety procedures built into the Babcock & Wilcox reactor really got a chance...
...operators overrode the automatic safety systems in their attempts to correct the rapidly developing crisis that occurred when an electricity-generator turbine tripped, or shut itself down. Those actions, says the report, turned what should have been a relatively minor glitch into a potential disaster. Instead of letting the reactor's emergency core cooling system perform its safety functions, the operators paid "undue attention" to keeping the coolant from overfilling the reactor and refused to believe instruments indicating that the plant's fuel core was getting perilously...