Word: tasse
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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 and set off steam explosions that would spread radioactivity...
Velikhov said workers were trying to protect ground water from radioactive contamination. "A new phase of work has begun," Tass quoted him as saying. "Work is being done to decontaminate and encapsulate the radioactive material. This will ensure it won't fall into the ground water...
...Tass for the first time issued close-up photos of the damaged reactor. The black-and-white pictures, apparently taken from a helicopter, showed the upper part of the reactor building blown off and piles of rubble lying at its base. Nearby buildings appeared undamaged...
...mystified about the actual developments at Chernobyl. While one U.S. news agency reported 2,000 dead and others emphasized the serious dangers the radiation created, the Soviets insisted that only two people had died. When some Western papers carried increasingly sensational but unconfirmed accounts of the reactor's condition, TASS reported that the fire was under control. At week's end the official Soviet news agency buttressed earlier claims of the plant's safety by reporting that Politburo Members Nikolai Ryzhkov and Yegor Ligachev had toured the damaged facility...
Stung by the Western reporting, the Soviet media launched a week-long counterattack. Each limited disclosure about Chernobyl was followed by a shrill TASS account of nuclear problems in the U.S. and Europe. On Wednesday the Soviets went further. In a three-minute news brief carried on all three Moscow channels, an announcer lashed out at the foreign coverage. Said he: "Some news agencies in the West are spreading rumors that thousands of people allegedly perished during the accident at the atomic power station. It has already been reported that in reality two people died and only 197 were hospitalized...