Word: reactor
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...March's elections, charges that the policy of headlong nuclear expansion was reckless, "launched like a railroad engine at 400 kilometers an hour." In August, some 30,000 protesters tried to slow the train down by staging a noisy demonstration at Super Phenix, the big French plutonium breeder reactor east of Lyon. Now there is concern about a new element in the government's aggressive program. It is a plan to help pay for the country's nuclear expansion by making France a major dealer in that growing international commodity, "spent" atomic fuel...
...signing up foreign power companies for the "reprocessing" of their nuclear wastes by still-to-be-built French facilities. Essentially, these wastes are used-up nuclear fuel in the form of long, needle-like rods encased in zircaloy metal sheaths. Once these rods have been used in a conventional reactor, the utilities normally keep them in large storage tanks that resemble swimming pools. But in reprocessing, the spent fuel is removed from the sheaths; usable quantities of plutonium and uranium are then separated from the waste and prepared as reactor fuel. Reprocessing thus not only allows utility companies...
...study concludes that saboteurs, properly prepared, could cause a melt down of the core of a nuclear reactor, which would result in a large release of radioactivity...
...They can furthermore choose a reactor which is near a large city and a day when the wind is blowing towards the city," the report said...
Workmen, using remote-control cutting torches and closed-circuit television, are slicing up the reactor a piece at a time. The slabs are then hoisted by a crane into an 8,000-gal. water tank, and will eventually be transported in sealed containers to a burial site in the Nevada desert. The task will take another year to complete and will cost about $8 million. To pull down an average-size commercial reactor today could conceivably cost as much as $100 million, and that cost is likely to soar in the years ahead...