Word: reactors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Narodichi district, 68 km (42 miles) from the reactor, according to local party official Valentin Budko, "the evacuation of children was finished only on June 7. Little wonder that there are so many sick children in our district, especially those with hyperplasia of the thyroid gland." This and other radiation-related disorders, like leukemia, have allegedly been misreported as more innocent sounding conditions...
...mismanagement, moreover, started long before the Chernobyl accident itself, claims Shcherbak. The reactor's safety system, approved by former Academy of Sciences head Aleksandrov, had design flaws, and, says Shcherbak, a near accident at a similar reactor in 1976 was hushed up. Most disturbing is the contention that safety violations are still going on. Budko and journalist Vladimir Kolinko, for example, say that food grown in contaminated soil is still being distributed to children, among others. And last week Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Moscow daily, published a story by Vladimir Lipsky, president of the Byelorussian branch of the Soviet Children...
...least one accusation -- that the accident released 1 billion or more curies of radiation, rather than the reported figure of 50 million to 80 million -- is denied by the authorities. Says Nikolai Steinberg, former chief engineer of the Chernobyl reactor and now deputy chairman of the State Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Industry: "We're not the only ones who came up with that figure. International scientists were involved as well." U.S. experts support the lower estimate. Nonetheless, Yablokov and other deputies have demanded that the Chernobyl installation, which is still operating, be closed down completely...
...earned her colleagues' respect. For several months she labored in relative obscurity, doing legwork on stories that rarely made it on the air ("They called me queen of the stakeouts"). Her big chance came after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. She broadcast live reports from the damaged reactor -- borrowing a producer's tennis shoes so she could stand atop the microwave truck in the rain without slipping off -- and got her first major exposure on the CBS Evening News. After a stint covering the 1980 presidential campaign, she was assigned to the State Department, where she impressed her bosses...
Western experts have long had reservations about Soviet reactor design, but deficiencies may be even worse in the areas of fire prevention, systems monitoring and damage control. The most recent accident indicates that the Soviet navy may be facing another problem common to all sub fleets: long-term stress in aging vessels. The Echo IIs were built in the early and mid-'60s; last week's accident could point to insufficient maintenance...