Word: term
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...began by far the gravest crisis in the troubled, 32-year history of commercial atomic power. A catastrophe had occurred over the weekend at the Chernobyl plant, 80 miles north of Kiev, where a reactor meltdown and explosion caused untold death and suffering and raised the prospect of long- term health and environmental damage on a far greater scale than anything yet unleashed by peaceful nuclear...
...taken to remove the tainted topsoil. Reason: cesium 137 and strontium 90, two radioactive particles spewed by the blaze, decay very slowly. It could take decades for the ground to be free of them. Together with the shorter-lived iodine 131, the substances promise to pose short- and long-term problems for people, crops and animals. Says James Warf, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California: "I wouldn't be surprised if the immediate area has to be evacuated for generations...
Though the accident was a type of core meltdown, the ultimate nuclear power nightmare, U.S. experts also called it a burnup. Meltdowns technically occur in reactors containing pools of water. When the water boils away, the molten core sinks into the earth in the so-called China syndrome, a term used by scientists, and popularized by the 1979 movie of the same name, that mordantly suggests that the radioactive mass might plunge all the way through the earth. The Chernobyl plant had no such pool, by contrast, and engineers expect the reactor to be consumed by intense heat...
...contrast to the Corporation, whichsupervises all financial matters as well as theday-to-day operations of the University, theOverseers assert their authority through thereview of personnel appointments and the settingof long-term academic policy for the variousfaculties...
...next term, the professor holding joint tenure in music and Afro-American studies will retire. Her departure, on a pragmatic level, will leave the University without a scholar in ethno-musicology; more symbolically, it will strip the small female contingent within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of any senior Black presence...