Word: xenon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While Metropolitan Edison--one of the owners of Three Mile Island--worked with NRC technicians and nuclear engineers trying to stabilize the haywire reactor, local residents were left uninformed. Hazardous Xenon 131 gas seeped into the atmosphere, and high-level bursts of radiation escaped to the containment building as plant officials released steam from the overheating equipment. Such steam releases were made, initially, without notifying local civil defense officials, who later expressed outrage at the situation's handling. These releases may have left their cancerous mark on thousands...
...deliberately vented more steam in brief bursts. Some of the spilled radioactive water from the primary loop was automatically drawn from the containment dome's floor into the neighboring pump-house building, which does not normally handle radioactive material and is not radiation-safe. The water gave off radioactive xenon and krypton gases that escaped through the plant's ventilation system into the atmosphere...
...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...
...Pennsylvania doses being talked about are so low that they could not induce cancer in man. Even children and fetuses would be unaffected." Also, the Environmental Protection Agency says that the emissions from the Three Mile Island plant involved only the inert gases krypton and xenon, which are thought to cause little damage to tissue, and not particles of radioactive iodine and strontium, both of which can enter the food chain. Radiation Biologist and Pediatrician Robert Brent of Philadelphia's Jefferson Medical College agrees that the health risks are small, but says that "one of the worst effects...
Nearly two hours later, Viking signaled that a xenon lamp, which simulates Martian sunlight in one of the biology experiments, had turned on. This confirmed that the arm had delivered soil to the laboratory and that the biology experiments had started. The first experiment-a search for evidence of the life process called photosynthesis-was under way. The photosynthesis experiment, plus the two that showed the unexpectedly early results, will take twelve days to complete. Furthermore, the tests will have to be repeated before Viking biologists can draw any firm conclusions about the existence of life in the particular soil...