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d********a 发帖数: 3698 | 1 有一次极严重的核电厂燃料棒融化的污染!据估计其污染程度是三哩岛的457倍! 美国
官方一直到5
星期后才在报纸上悄悄的报道了这个事故.
“50 Years After America’s Worst Nuclear Meltdown
Human error helped worsen a nuclear meltdown just outside Los Angeles,
and now human inertia has stymied the radioactive cleanup for half a
century.
By Joan Trossman Bien and Michael Collins
http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/50-years-after
meltdown-3510/
The Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
For Release Saturday A.M., August 29, 1959
CANOGA PARK, CA
“During an inspection of fuel elements on July 26 at the Sodium Reactor
Experiment, operated for the Atomic Energy Commission at Santa Susana,
California by Atomics International, a division of North American
Aviation, Inc., a parted fuel element was observed.
The fuel element damage is not an indication of unsafe reactor
conditions. No release of radioactive materials to the plant or its
environs occurred and operating personnel were not exposed to harmful
conditions…
In each case, all seven tubes of the fuel element remained in the core.
This fuel loading, nearing the end of its useful life, was scheduled to
be removed in the near future.”
This press release — issued five weeks after the end of the United
States’ worst nuclear reactor meltdown — was the public’s first
notification that something unusual had happened up on “The Hill.” For
the next 20 years, it remained the only public notification about the
accident at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory on a mountaintop in
California’s eastern Ventura County, on the border with the San Fernando
Valley.
In fact, from July 12 through July 26, 1959, an unknown amount of
radioactive gases were intentionally vented to prevent the Sodium
Reactor Experiment from overheating and exploding.
Unlike most conventional reactors that circulate water to be heated by
the fuel rods in the core in order to turn steam turbines, the SRE used
sodium because it could operate under lower pressure. Pure sodium — not
to be confused with table salt, or sodium chloride — was a risky metal
to use since it catches fire when exposed to air and explodes when mixed
with water.
Due to the experimental nature of the SRE, it was built without a
containment structure — the distinctive large dome associated with
nuclear power plants — so any radiation vented hot out over the San
Fernando Valley, which the city of Los Angeles was busily annexing. What
exactly vented remains in contention.
“We know there was a fuel meltdown,” said William Taylor, the current
spokesman for the U.S. Department of Energy. “We don’t know how much
[radiation] or if any was released.”
According to an analysis of a five-year study by a panel of independent
scientists convened years after the incident, the SRE accident spit out
up to 459 times the amount of radiation released during the 1979
meltdown at Three Mile Island.
Fifty years later, the contaminated site has yet to be cleaned up,
although this month two federal agencies promised to plow ahead without
the site’s current owner, Boeing. And in March, the Department of Energy
provided $38.3 million in funds to complete the radiologic survey of
“Area IV” as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Unlike
the then-remote hilltop it once was, now more than a half million people
live within 10 miles of The Hill, and downtown Los Angeles is 30 miles
away.
The Race to Conquer the Atom
The Santa Susana Field Laboratory was built on 2,850 acres in the mid-
1940s. A portion of the facility was dedicated to nuclear research,
while other portions were marked to develop powerful rocket engines such
as the Delta II. The federal Atomic Energy Commission and the private
Atomics International chose the land high in the hills above the
farthest end of the west San Fernando Valley precisely because the work
could be dangerous and the population sparse. | m*****u 发帖数: 15526 | 2 民猪社会照样隐瞒。包括那个拿危地马拉人做人体实验的事 |
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