Word: reactors
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...average nuclear reactor produces 400 to 500 pounds of plutonium a year. One pound, distributed evenly through the atmosphere, is enough to give every person on earth lung cancer for so goes the estimate of Dr. Helen Caldicott, author of Nuclear Madness and an anti-nuclear activist). One-millionth of a gram of plutonium constitutes a carcinogen dose. That's just one of the dangers when reactors operate "safely." Since at Three Mile Island, the public has learned that far more dangerous accidents will happen, and the anti-nuclear movement has been swelling...
...Continual degassing of the bubbly water in the reactor's primary cooling system. Objective: to remove any lingering, potentially explosive hydrogen and reduce water pressure within the reactor...
...Testing pumps to see if they will circulate coolant through the reactor's steam generator, which creates the steam that normally powers the electricity-producing turbogenerator...
...these steps, which should bring the reactor temperature down to around 93° C (200° F), are only a prelude to the grand finale: a kind of exercise in Yankee ingenuity that the engineers are calling natural circulation. It is an apt name and involves elements of physics taught in grade school. Bypassing the residual heat removal system, the heat will be transported out of the core by free convection-the principle at work when hot water circulates in a simmering teakettle...
...simple remedy, the entire secondary loop will be pumped "solid" with water rather than its usual complement of steam and water. Then the primary loop's pumps will be shut off. And lo, what might be called Operation Teakettle will start. Hot water will rise through convection in the reactor's core, and be carried off by a leg of the radioactive-tight primary loop that is already blueprinted as the "hot leg." The water's destination: the steam generator, where it will transfer (exchange, in engineering parlance) much of its heat to the water now flowing in the separated...