Word: reactors
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...After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the river, which flows near the reactor, became radioactive. With toxic silt still flowing downstream in the Pripyat, which is some 441 miles long, a dam on the left bank has been the only effective countermeasure, and dredging remains dangerous...
...London doctors who attended Litvinenko's bedside quickly suspected that some kind of radioactive agent was causing his decline. His hair was falling out, his athlete's body was shriveling, his bone marrow was failing, just as if he had been one of the firemen called to the burning reactor at Chernobyl. But gamma spectrometers found nothing unusual in his blood or urine. As doctors ruled out a slew of increasingly obscure toxins and bugs, the patient's condition worsened. In desperation, the police sent his urine to Britain's Atomic Weapons Establishment, which has equipment beyond the reach...
...POLICE ARE TAKING ALL SUCH CLAIMS with a grain of salt--and turning their attention, rather, to the grains of polonium 210 that are at the center of the case. This is no garden-variety poison: polonium needs a nuclear reactor to cook it up and extremely careful handling. At first, the discovery of the element seemed to hang responsibility on the Kremlin. Russia is a big producer of polonium (although its annual output, less than a hundred grams a year, shows just how rare it is). The element is hard to procure. In the U.S., it takes a government...
...There are other, trickier challenges that would have to be overcome. Part of the justification for a lunar base has always been that the moon is rich in helium-3, an isotope of common helium that could serve as fuel in eventual fusion reactors. Astronauts could, in theory, mine the stuff and ship it back to Earth. That's fine, but first we have to, well, invent the reactor. What's more, as the beleaguered crews aboard the International Space Station have discovered, sometimes just maintaining your ship can take all your time and the mission itself - scientific research, mining...
...European Union and five other nations will begin construction this spring on a $12.8 billion reactor to mimic the sun's nuclear fusion, in theory creating a limitless supply of energy...