Word: reactors
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...Millstone, her agency found such pervasive noncompliance that it ordered all three plants there to shut down for sweeping repairs. A year later, Northeast is facing $1 billion in shutdown costs; the Millstone plants remain idle, with thousands of compliance problems still to be resolved; and a fourth Northeast reactor, Connecticut Yankee, has been permanently mothballed...
...lethal radiation killing at least 30 people and affecting thousands more across the then-Soviet Union and Europe. On April 26, 1986 the blast at unit no. 4 caused a nuclear meltdown, with blazes burning at temperatures of up to 5000 Fahrenheit, or twice that of molten steel. The reactor burned for two weeks slowly releasing dangerous radioactivity into the air. The radiation, carried by the wind, wound its lethal path across the Soviet Union's best farmland north toward Scandinavia. By week's end, an ominous pall of radiation had spread across Eastern Europe and toward the shores...
This is how existing neutrino detectors work in Japan, Italy, Russia and the U.S. What makes S.N.O. different is its exclusive use of heavy water, abundantly available in Canada because it is stockpiled for use in a type of nuclear reactor Canadians favor. Says Barry Robertson, S.N.O.'s associate director: "It's the heavy water that makes this project worth the trouble." An extra neutron in the nucleus doesn't make the water's appearance, chemistry or taste any different from ordinary water used in other detectors. It does, however, change its nuclear structure enough to make this observatory sensitive...
During the spring outage, a valve was accidentally left open, spilling 12,000 gal. of reactor-coolant water--a blunder that further shook Galatis' faith. He began to see problems almost everywhere he looked and proposed the creation of a global-issues task force to find out whether Millstone was safe enough to go back online. His bosses agreed. But when the head of the task force left for a golf vacation a few weeks before the plant was scheduled to start up, Galatis says, he knew it wasn't a serious effort. So he made a call to Ernest...
While playing detective--sniffing through file drawers and computer directories--Galatis found items that he felt suggested collusion between the utility and its regulator. Safety reports made it clear that both on-site inspectors and officials from the NRC's Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation had known about the full-core off-loads since at least 1987 but had never done anything about them. Now, to clear the way for the fall 1995 off-load, NRC officials were apparently offering Northeast what Galatis calls "quiet coaching." One sign of this was a draft version of an NRC inspection report about...