Word: uranium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first time company officials conceded that the reactor core was not cooling down, as they had been assuring the public for three days. The average temperature in the core had remained stubbornly at 280° F., while some of the core's fuel rods, which are filled with fissionable uranium, showed spots as high as 600°. When reporters pressed for more information, Vice President Herbein turned hostile. Said he: "I don't know why we need to tell you each and every thing we do. People around the plant have to recognize that we have to get on with...
...plumbing goes, nuclear power plants exceed Rube Goldberg's wildest fantasies. The basic idea sounds simple-unstable heavy atoms, like those of uranium 235, break up (fission). Scattered in all directions are electrically neutral particles called neutrons as well as fission products such as shortlived radioactive xenon, krypton and iodine. The neutrons hit still other atoms like errant billiard balls in a chain reaction that produces heat. But obtaining useful energy from this process can be extremely complex. Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear plant has two pressurized water reactors. Such reactors are based on a design pioneered...
...moviegoers, a superbly suspenseful, expertly crafted, entirely riveting entertainment. It is hard to recall a movie of recent years as absorbing, or as much fun, as The China Syndrome. That rather obscure title, by the way, refers to the theoretical destination of a plant's super-hot uranium core if it somehow lost its liquid coolant and burned through the floor, into the earth and onward to China...
...safe." If it means accident-proof, then the answer, as applied to anything from a bicycle to a steel mill, is no. A nuclear plant cannot blow up like an atomic bomb. A plant could, however, suffer a "meltdown" if it loses the water used to cool its uranium core, overheats, ruptures the core's container and releases a deadly cloud of radioactive gases. In the event of such an accident, people close to the plant would die quickly, while others, living as far as a couple of hundred miles downwind of the plant, might die later of radiation...
...outsiders, there does not seem to be much in Chad worth fighting about. Carved out of former French Equatorial Africa, it is impoverished, plagued by drought, malaria and periodic locust swarms. Its only known resource is a uranium deposit far in the north. Perhaps it is Chad's poverty (annual per capita income: $120) that makes its religious and ethnic rivalries so fierce. With so little to go around, each side must fight all the harder to obtain a life-sustaining share...