Word: shutoffs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger has scarcely helped. He got off to a good start by warning in February that the shutoff of oil exports from Iran had created a situation " prospectively more serious than the Arab oil embargo" of 1973-74. That statement was widely dismissed as alarmist, but it now seems only too accurate. Lately, the Secretary's statements have been so contradictory that one oil executive exclaims: "The real odd-and-even plan is Schlesinger's assessment of the energy situation...
...collapse, Energy Secretary James Schlesinger brought up an even gloomier subject: the increasing chances for an outright oil shortage. He warned of the looming squeeze in some of the scariest terms yet used by any Administration official. He told a Senate committee that the six-week-old Iranian oil shutoff could turn out to be "prospectively more serious" than the five-month Arab oil embargo of 1973-74 because it could last much longer...
Schlesinger's aides, seeking to fend off criticism that their boss had overplayed the perils posed by the Iranian oil shutoff, quickly sought to explain that the Secretary was trying to promote "prudence, not panic." Indeed, the Iranian situation is already having a significant adverse effect on oil supplies. Since late December, lost Iranian production has been causing a worldwide petroleum shortfall of approximately 2.5 million bbl. a day. That is almost exactly the same amount that was lost during the 1973 Arab embargo, and oil companies are being forced to dip ever deeper into their inventories to make...
...problem this time is the Iranian oil shutoff. At first, U.S. officials dismissed the Iranian oilfield strike as a temporary phenomenon of no great consequence. But the strike has been dragging on since late October, and for the last month virtually no crude at all has been pumped out of the ground. Last week, in fact, the U.S. faced the bizarre situation of having to rush an emergency shipment of 200,000 barrels of diesel fuel and gasoline to Iran because local refinery output is insufficient to meet domestic needs...