Word: reactors
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...control room and an adjacent auditorium at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory kept their eyes riveted on a bank of computer monitors. They waited anxiously as technicians injected less than 1 oz. of tritium gas into the doughnut-shaped hollow at the heart of a 50-ft.- tall reactor in the next room. Then they waited some more as the tritium mixed with deuterium gas already inside and the combination was heated with powerful radio beams...
...addition to blocking inspections of two secret sites to which the IAEA demanded access last February, Pyongyang is now refusing to allow even routine monitoring of five declared nuclear sites at Yongbyon, 65 miles north of the capital, and two other sites elsewhere. At a 5-MW power reactor whose fuel core could be mined for plutonium to make bombs, IAEA inspectors are not being allowed to reload spent surveillance cameras. Three smaller research facilities due for inspection have been off limits since May 1992. A uranium fuel-fabrication plant slated for examination every three months has not been seen...
...between two generations of acting styles: meticulous method vs. star quality. On offense is Malkovich the master thespian, building a character with wigs and fake noses, gunning the menace by alternating a spooky stillness with violent shifts of his wispy, lispy voice. On defense is Clint the listener, the reactor, whose worn, handsome face is his technique. In these moments, you see agitated Actor and aging Star in a hot war of wits. The shoot-out is wonderful to watch...
...basic story of what happened on April 26, 1986, at reactor 4 of the nuclear power station near Chernobyl, in the Soviet Ukraine, is well known by now: an explosion and fire; the death of 31 people from acute radiation exposure and dozens more from diseases plausibly related to milder exposure; the likelihood of a surge in cancers over the next few decades; the poisoning of crops and livestock. The accident and its aftermath, coming less than a decade after the near meltdown at Three Mile Island, also poisoned the world's attitude toward nuclear power...
...should have been predictable. Indeed, the Soviet nuclear industry had already had a long history of accidents. Because those were considered state secrets, though, most people -- including many in the industry -- had never heard of them. Read uncovers the startling fact that some critical aspects of the Chernobyl reactor's behavior that were known to its designers were never passed along to the operators. Perversely, the operators and their bosses were tried and jailed for the accident, while political higher-ups mostly avoided punishment...