Word: sanding
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...first Hanford reactor was built in 1943, amid the remote sand and sagebrush near the juncture of the Snake and Columbia rivers, to provide plutonium for the bomb destined to destroy Nagasaki. The N reactor (its predecessors have all gone to their last great fission in the sky) dates back 23 years -- and was designed to last only 20. The parts are worn, the pumps and wiring often fail, the whole reactor conks out 20 to 25 times a year. The graphite casing that holds the nuclear rods is swelling by nearly an inch a year, and will collide with...
...foggy, Ocean Beach on San Francisco's Pacific side is frequented mainly by surfers and dog walkers -- and now a prospector. Engineer John O'Grady, 71, believes this desolate spot may be one of the most valuable mineral sites on the West Coast. O'Grady thinks that the sand on Ocean Beach contains tons of titanium, a lightweight metal that the U.S. uses in plane fuselages and the Soviet Union has put into submarine hulls. Ocean Beach's titanium could help supply U.S. defense needs into the next century, says O'Grady -- and, at $40 or more a ton, could...
...government supported the vigilantes in order to drive the squatters into Khayelitsha, a new settlement the government created by bulldozing sand dunes, or back to the homelands. Meanwhile, the refugees had no desire to go to Khayelitsha--"it's one of the most barren places I've ever seen," says Waldorf--and had little choice but to flee to the nearby townships...
...have a way of shaping adult occupations. Take Gary Larson. As a youngster growing up in Tacoma, Larson collected lizards, snakes, frogs, salamanders and one monkey. Aided by his older brother, he regularly flooded the backyard to create swamps. Once, for a change of pace, the Larson boys hauled sand into the basement and built a miniature Mojave complete with horned toads. Throughout it all, Larson's parents remained remarkably serene, even that day when Dad, a car salesman, came home and found his son's 8-ft. boa constrictor curled up in the sewing machine...
Novelist Rybakov, 75, is best known for his adventure stories and children's books, as well as the 1978 novel Heavy Sand, about Soviet Jews' persecution by the Nazis during World War II. He describes his new work, which is set in the year 1934, as a "group portrait" of his own generation at a time when Stalin was consolidating power before the Great Terror. In the manner of Tolstoy's War and Peace, the novel mixes fact and fiction, historical figures and imaginary ones. Most important, it contains a "full portrait of the man" Stalin, Rybakov told...