Word: safes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Toxic waste and radioactive contamination could lead to shortages of safe drinking water, the sine qua non of human existence. And in a world that could house between 8 billion and 14 billion people by the mid-21st century, there is a strong likelihood of mass starvation. It is even possible to envision the world so wryly and chillingly prophesied by the typewriting cockroach in Donald Marquis' archy and mehitabel: "man is making deserts of the earth/ it wont be long now/ before man will have it used up/ so that nothing but ants/ and centipedes and scorpions/ can find...
That is not good enough, however. The same stability that makes CFCs so safe in industrial use makes them extremely long-lived: some of the CFCs released today will still be in the atmosphere a century from now. Moreover, each atom of chlorine liberated from a CFC can break up as many as 100,000 molecules of ozone...
...help replenish America's dwindling supply of tritium, a vital component in atom bombs. But if approved by Congress, the Idaho facility could play an even more important role in the civilian use of nuclear power. For it is based on what proponents claim is a fail-safe technology, one that virtually eliminates the danger of a meltdown...
...plants have the potential of providing abundant supplies of electricity without spewing pollutants into the atmosphere. But the nuclear- power industry has failed to deliver on that promise, at least in the U.S. Even before the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, the costs of making atomic power safe were spiraling out of control. Since that episode, the industry has been at a standstill...
...problem with defense in depth is that no matter how many layers of safety are built into a conventional reactor, it can never be 100% safe against a meltdown. At its Idaho plant, the Energy Department wants to try a different strategy. Rather than construct a giant atomic pile that requires the cooling of large quantities of concentrated fuel, designers propose to build a series of four small-scale, modular reactors that use fuel in such small quantities that their cores could not achieve meltdown temperatures under any circumstances. The fuel would be packed inside tiny heat-resistant ceramic spheres...