Word: reactor
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...WATER reactor, like Vernon, has a fuel cycle of one year, which means that the spent-but highly radioactive-fuel is stored in the reactor for a year at a time. Such materials may accumulate to 1000 times the radioactivity of one Hiroshima-sized bomb. Although a reactor cannot sustain a nuclear explosion, the presence of many hundreds of tons of material which is one billion times more toxic than any known industrial substance is an unparalleled hazard, especially during fuel replacement. Such replacement is an extraordinarily delicate operation and, in the case of Con Edison's Indian Point...
Another drawback of the Vernon reactor is its operational requirement to release low-level radioactive liquid and gaseous wastes from time to time. The AEC contends that these wastes are harmless. But a recent paper has shown remarkable correlation between changes in infant mortality and radioactive gaseous discharges in Illinois in the area surrounding the Dresden No. 1 power station (a BWR of one-third the capacity of Vernon) over the past ten years. Dresden's annual effluents ranged from 34,860 to 800,000 curies from...
These are hotly debated issues but the town of Brattleboro (12,800 people) lies only four miles from the reactor, 65 per cent of the time downwind. Amherst is within forty miles as is Boston's entire water supply, the Quabbin Reservoir, soon to be supplemented by the Connecticut River. And twenty miles beyond Quabbin lies Springfield with more than 500,000 people. As the Tennessee Valley Authority's manager of power, G. O. Wessenauer, has said...
...periodic low-level discharges are not what principally alarms anti-reactor groups. The big fear is of a major accident at Vernon. Although it is certain that the plant cannotsustain a full, A-bomb blast, it can easily run out of control, melting its safety devices and enclosures. Such overheating would cause explosions of superheated water which could rupture the reactor shielding, releasing highly radioactive particles and gases...
...well equipped are reactors to avert accidents? Out of almost 4000 construction standards for nuclear plants only about 100 have been officially recognized. And in the recent construction of a reactor in Gravel Neck, Virginia, the welding superintendent admitted that as many as 5000 welds in vital parts of the structure could be defective. A cooling water failure might precipitate a "runaway" which could cause a high-power steam explosion within one-hundredth of a second. Vernon's emergency cooling system takes from three to ten seconds to become effectively operational...