Word: reactors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...close range, though, the radiation-bearing plume could be deadly. The immediate danger was, of course, greatest for those nearest the disaster. Said Kerry Dance, president of GA Technologies, a San Diego reactor builder: "The people who are in trouble are those right at the site." Henry Wagner, a professor of radiation health sciences at Johns Hopkins, speculated that local residents risked exposure to extreme doses of radiation that could cause cerebral hemorrhaging, nausea, vomiting and death within hours...
...left the world mystified about the actual developments at Chernobyl. While one U.S. news agency reported 2,000 dead and others emphasized the serious dangers the radiation created, the Soviets insisted that only two people had died. When some Western papers carried increasingly sensational but unconfirmed accounts of the reactor's condition, TASS reported that the fire was under control. At week's end the official Soviet news agency buttressed earlier claims of the plant's safety by reporting that Politburo Members Nikolai Ryzhkov and Yegor Ligachev had toured the damaged facility...
...were hospitalized." Viewers then saw a grainy black-and-white photo of what was described as Chernobyl's stricken Unit No. 4. Commentator Alexander Galkin said the photo proved that the damage was less severe than Western reporters had claimed. In fact, the photo showed that part of the reactor's roof had blown off and that there was substantial damage to the walls...
...Soviet Union spent last week in a festive mood for the annual May Day pageant, which combines celebrations of international worker solidarity with the rites of spring. Amid the red flags and bunting that adorned Moscow's bridges and thoroughfares for the four-day holiday, headlines about the ruined reactor would have been unwelcome indeed. Wearing a hat and light topcoat, Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev waved frequently at the hundreds of thousands of marchers who went past him in Red Square and showed no sign whatever of being preoccupied with other matters...
...accident, Western experts in Moscow and elsewhere were gradually piecing together the probable sequence of events that led to disaster (see diagram). The trouble seems to have begun Saturday, April 26, when a mishap caused a loss of the water that continuously cools the uranium fuel rods in the reactor's core. With the coolant gone, superheated steam could have triggered ) a series of irreversible reactions leading to a meltdown of the fuel and a blast that ripped through the roof of the building that housed Unit...