Word: soiling
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...about sealing off the reactor and cleaning up nearby areas last week. Helicopters continued to drop tons of sand, lead and boron onto the reactor each day to keep radiation from reaching the air. On the ground, crews worked to seal off the 570 degrees mass from the soil and water below. The news agency TASS reported that at one crucial point, three men in protective garments dove into a pool that had collected beneath the reactor and opened valves to let the water out. That ended the danger that the reactor could fall into the pool...
Velikhov, the vice president of the Soviet Academy of Scientists and a director of the Chernobyl cleanup, said soil was being frozen and cement was being poured with the goal of sealing off the damaged reactor. Officials will decide afterward whether to reactivate the power plant, he was quoted as saying...
Whatever the cause of the wasteland, a few years after the disaster, the government sent death squads of prisoners to cover up the contaminated soil with sand. The workers were housed in special barracks, and many probably died from intense doses of radiation. Sometime after Tumerman's visit, Soviet authorities seem to have completely given up on the region, evacuating all farmers, destroying their houses and fencing the area off with barbed wire. Finally, officials decided to use the devastated zone as a radiological training ground for army troops...
...leak. When they found nothing, they lined up some 600 workers at the plant and tested them with a Geiger counter. This time the signals were even more alarming: the workers' clothing gave off radiation far above contamination levels. Outside, monitors took Geiger counter readings of the soil and greenery surrounding the plant. The result showed four to five times the normal amount of radioactive emissions. Clearly, something was wrong -- terribly wrong...
...people. Democracy can be helped and nurtured, but it cannot be given. It was imposed on Japan and to a lesser extent on West Germany by American occupation ! forces, but that happened in the exceptional and transforming circumstance of crushing defeat. Democracy must grow organically, in its own soil. Rebellion against arbitrary rule is relatively easy, but it is extremely difficult to organize a free society. Freedom, as logicians might say, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for democracy...