Nuclear Reactor

Congressional investigators said Wednesday that it would cost $1.2 billion to refurbish deteriorating systems at the federal government's aging nuclear reactor at Hanford, Wash., but that its existing design appears to offer clear safety advantages over a similar nuclear power plant that exploded last April in the Soviet Union. The General Accounting Office report was released in Washington by Sen. Mark O. Hatfield (R-Ore.), who immediately assailed plans by the U.S.

Russia brushed aside strong U.S. criticism Wednesday and said it had agreed with Tehran to speed up construction of an $800-million nuclear reactor in Iran and to consider building another. The United States, which has branded Iran part of an "axis of evil" for allegedly developing weapons of mass destruction, fiercely opposes the Islamic Republic's nuclear program.

Serbian police sealed off nearly half of the capital early Thursday while 6,000 unused nuclear reactor fuel rods were taken to the airport for shipment to Russia. Helicopters hovered over the city as heavily armed police officers guarded the 22-mile route to the airport from the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences, just outside Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital.

He was a young engineer not long out of college and recently married. His new job: Help build a nuclear reactor. Thirty-five years later, Jarlath Curran is nearing retirement age. But he's got one more thing to do: Help tear down that reactor. Curran, 61, is one of the reasons Southern California Edison Co. decided to start decommission now of Unit I of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

Southern California Edison has resolved nearly all of the obstacles to ship a decommissioned nuclear reactor to South Carolina and hopes to begin the move in a matter of weeks. If successful, the move would end more than a year of debate over how to dispose of the 668-ton piece of radioactive waste. Until now, transporting Unit 1 from the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in northern San Diego County has been problematic.

The weekend Iraqi missile attack on Israel's south, targeted at the Dimona nuclear reactor, broke a bit of the complacency creeping into a nation that is eager to shed its gas masks. Despite the renewed worries, officials are giving assurances that the reactor could stand up to a Scud missile blast and much, much more. The Dimona reactor is Israel's not-so-secret source of enriched plutonium for the making of atomic weapons.

Two decades after Israeli warplanes destroyed Iraq's only nuclear reactor, the air force general who commanded the raid has disclosed that Israel's intelligence community had fought the mission, arguing that it was too risky. In a rare interview marking the 20th anniversary of the June 1981 precision bombing, David Ivry said the intelligence chiefs believed that the raid was unlikely to succeed--and that even if it did, it would retard Iraq's nuclear weapons program by no more than five years.

Sometime in the next few weeks, a disabled Soviet spy satellite carrying a highly charged nuclear reactor will drop out of its shallow orbit. If it burns up in the upper atmosphere--as Moscow predicts--it will go largely unnoticed by the general public, just another of the hundreds of pieces of space junk that fall from the sky every year. But if the satellite follows the predictions of some American space experts, it will plunge to Earth, scattering radioactive debris wherever it lands. The 4.

A series of grim developments hit a shaken Japan on Wednesday, including reports that high-level radiation may have leaked from a second damaged nuclear reactor and emergency workers being forced to temporarily abandon the crippled complex. The setbacks aggravated public fears that authorities might not be able to contain the expanding nuclear crisis. Japan's chief Cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, said radioactive steam might have escaped from the containment unit of a second reactor at the Fukushima No.1 (Daiichi)