Word: reactors
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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NORTH KOREA. Satellite pictures show that in 1987 the country completed a 30- MW reactor. That is too big for research -- such reactors generally run 10 MW or less -- and too small for electric-power production, which generally requires a reactor producing 200 MW or more. Besides, the satellite pictures show no electric generators or power lines alongside the reactor to carry off the electricity. So the reactor appears designed to do what bombmakers need: begin the process of producing plutonium for use in weapons. Satellite photos also show another and bigger (50-to-200-MW) reactor under construction; analysts...
...wide variety of fields from astronomy to theoretical physics, computer simulation has replaced laboratory experimentation as a basic tool of scientific research. It is much easier to study the behavior of ionized gases in a computer simulation, for example, than it is to build a full-scale nuclear- fusion reactor. "We've whetted an awful lot of scientific appetites," says Larry Smarr, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign...
...sudden power failure struck New York State's Nine Mile Point Nuclear Station like a sucker punch last week, knocking out vital instruments and warning lights. When backup power systems also failed, operators were unable to monitor the reactor core for 20 chilling minutes. "It was like losing your speedometer, dashboard lights and headlights when you're going down the road at 70," said Peter Slocum, a spokesman for the State Disaster Preparedness Commission. Plant officials declared a "site area emergency," the second highest level of alert under federal regulations. It was only the third time such an emergency...
...version of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Ja'afer, a Shi'ite Muslim, is an outspoken human-rights advocate who has been jailed for his protests against Saddam Hussein's oppression. Yet he has been honing his country's nuclear capabilities since the early 1960s. He directed operations at the Osirak reactor until an Israeli raid destroyed it in 1981, and he later served as senior technician for the Tarmiya and Sharqat pilot plants, centerpieces of what U.N. investigators say was an advanced nuclear weapons program. U.S. government sources contend that under Ja'afer's supervision, Saddam's nuclear program got sizable...
...openness, Western officials were stunned by the breadth of the Iraqi enrichment effort, and suspected that Saddam's disclosure only hinted at his actual nuclear capability. Indeed, the intelligence failure is almost as frightening as the prospect of Saddam's bomb. After Israeli jets destroyed Iraq's Osirak research reactor in 1981, Baghdad embarked headlong on a secret enrichment program that relied on an old-fashioned method called electromagnetic isotope separation. Used by Manhattan Project scientists in the 1940s, the technology is considered so obsolete that it is discussed openly in scientific literature and can be built from relatively common...