Word: roomful
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no "meaning" beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience...
WATCHING PETER SELLARS' Much Ado About Nothing is like walking across a room blindfolded--it's easy if you're well acquainted with the terrain but painful and confusing if you're not. Sellars has assaulted Shakespeare's script with the aid of a talented but small troupe, and of the author's carefully pointed satires and balanced symmetries he has left only fuzzy outlines...
Suddenly, a shrill alarm shatters the control room's silence. Red lights flash on the instrument panel. One of the reactor's steam condensers has lost its vacuum, causing a turbine "trip," or shutoff. No longer is the reactor able to shed heat produced by its radioactive core. Ominously its temperature climbs, threatening to boil away the coolant. Unless something is done fast, there may be a meltdown, spilling lethal radioactive gases...
Real as it seemed, the taut control-room drama was only a training exercise. In fact, "emergencies" are daily happenings at General Electric's Boiling Water Reactor Training Center in Morris, Ill., 50 miles southwest of Chicago. Since it opened eleven years ago, it has been instructing more than 400 people a year in the fine art of running and maintaining G.E.-built reactors. Says Don Janacek, the school's "dean": "Our aim is to produce people who can operate their plants not just efficiently but safely...
...prove his point, Janacek moves to the rear of the control room, glances at a panel with such legends as FEED-WATER PUMP FAILURE, STEAM-LINE RUPTURE and RELIEF-VALVE FAILURE, and presses a button. The effect is jarring. Alarms give off an almost hysterical shrill. Control-panel lights flash, and overhead lights dim. He has simulated the rupture of a 21-in.-diameter water line, which can empty the reactor of vital cooling water in less than a minute...