Word: reactors
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This energy costs environmentally: Generating electricity involves burning fossil fuels or running a nuclear reactor or hydroelectric plant. These processes can result in many forms of pollution: acid mine drainage, oil spills, natural gas leakage, toxic waste and air pollutants. Energy efficient lighting can decrease the amount of energy needed to meet lighting electricity demand by more than 50 percent...
...bilateral funding, and will make small initial contributions. Though the fund is eventually supposed to total $700 million, it will start with $75 million, all but $14 million put up by Germany and France -- the G-7 nations most likely to breathe fallout borne by the winds from a reactor accident in Eastern Europe. One problem: what to do with 19 Chernobyl-style reactors that cannot be made safe and should be shut down altogether -- which would deprive their surrounding areas of needed electricity...
...handling of Chernobyl is hardly reassuring. When workers finished the huge steel-and-concrete shell that entombs the intensely radioactive mass of the shattered No. 4 reactor in late 1986, Soviet officials declared the site safe for at least 30 years. Yet today the sarcophagus is cracked, crumbling and in peril of a disastrous collapse. The melted-down fuel is turning to unstable dust. Contaminated objects are being smuggled out of the poorly guarded 1,092-sq.-mi. exclusion zone. Birds fly into the sarcophagus through holes as big as a garage door; rats breed in the ruin. The structure...
...Chernobyl the concern is even more immediate. There is ever-present danger in the operation of reactor No. 3 too. Despite a government plan to shut down the entire plant, No. 3 was reactivated after officials pleaded that its energy was essential for the coming winter. Like its ruined twin, No. 3 is ; considered fundamentally unsafe by the International Atomic Energy Agency. It may be even more so now: many Russian operators have returned home, leaving a reactor run by Ukrainians who are ill-trained, badly paid and demoralized...
...spots abound in the buildings and equipment around Chernobyl. A disabled bulldozer sets off alarms on hand-held radiometers, showing 10 times the internationally accepted exposure level for nuclear-power workers. The big Mi- 8 helicopters that were used to drop sand into the blazing reactor in 1986 -- collecting such heavy radiation that some pilots died -- rest in a field along with hundreds of contaminated trucks and armored personnel carriers, many stripped of engines and electronic gear. The radiation is not enough to cause immediate illness, but looters are taking long-term risks. Health officials estimate that 10,000 deaths...