Word: roomful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There was no panic at the plant, situated on a stretch of muddy soil called Three Mile Island in an otherwise scenic bend in the river. The men in the control room had heard those sirens before. They went about their task of meeting what looked at first like just another "transient," a minor glitch somewhere in the complex system like so many they had dealt with in the past. Unit 2's huge turbine, which generates 880 megawatts of electricity, had "tripped," shut down automatically, as it should when the steam that turns it has somehow been...
...Prussia reported later in the day that radio activity had been detected as far as 16 miles from the plant, and claimed that radiation within the reactor containment building had risen to a startling 1,000 times its normal level. At one point operators in the nearby control room had to put on protective gas masks...
...eliminating the problem were considered by the increasingly anxious engineers. One was to try burning off the hydrogen under controlled circumstances. The second was to gradually raise the pressure inside the reactor to the point that the hydrogen would dissolve in the water at the bottom of the reactor room. The third choice was to lower the water level at the floor of the reactor room and pour fresh water in from the top, thus pushing the bubble toward the bottom and away from the fuel rods. Another possibility was to restart the reactor, generating heat and steam that might...
...Sunday, the President helicoptered from Washington to visit the ailing plant. The former navy nuclear engineer toured the control room, was briefed by the experts in charge of solving the reactor problems and afterward issued a reassuring statement. Even if an evacuation is ordered of the Three Mile Island area, Carter said, "This will not indicate that danger is high. It will be strictly a precautionary measure...
Next door, Karl Krodel, a computer technician, his wife and three children had piled travel clothes on chairs in their living room. But Krodel was reluctant to evacuate. "We're ready to go if they tell us to," he said. "But we're not going before that. If it is dangerous, we already got it Wednesday. We just built this home two years ago and we're not about to desert...