European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - May 11, 1986, Darmstadt, Hesse                                M physicists consider damage to farm land new York times Here is wide agreement among american physicists that never before has a nation. Been faced with the possibility of extensive radiation damage to Large tracts of Farmland. Tha options Tor detoxifying radioactive soil Are limited these scientists said for smaller areas surface soil can be stripped shipped away and burled. The United states did this in two previous nuclear accidents. After a . Air Force plane carrying nuclear weapons crashed in Spain in the 1950s, spilling plutonium on several Hundred acres of Wheatland bulldozers stripped the Topsail and shipped it Back to the United states to be burled. In the late 1970s the United Stales stripped and buried soil on the Marshall islands that had been made radioactive by nuclear testing in the 1950s. With extensive contamination scientists said the Best option will probably be patience. The russians May have to just wait it out said or. Radioactive elements and the food Chain in Tow of or Iilona detected ram the chernobyl reactor Accident lha european Community Hus banned All imports of fresh meal and Dairy product Wall us Trull and . Ivol Epif Bioc catch ii. Iut pm Likely to to or Neil in a Ilioiu irom .  ice in tha targeted Organ or. In rotated los Fatuet Luno Krypton is Bones francium h vol Rtuh Tom Crelles a physicist at the Lawrence love Mora Nasonal Laboratory in Livermore Calif. If there has been significant contamination the radioactivity will need to decay before food can be grown there again.". Crites said one of the radioactive materials in the nuclear Cloud spread by the disaster cerium 137, has a Hal mile he Amoun o Lime required Lor tha disintegration o Hall the atoms in a Sample of seme radioactive substance of 37 years. He said ii lakes roughly seven half lives Lor a radioactive substance to decay to Sale Levels Hanford reactor a Grapelle moderated unit without containment areas used by the Energy department in the production of nuclear weapons should be added Toth list. It serves no useful purpose and should be shut Down said Eugene Rosoff executive director of the coalition Lor Safe Power. The Nhuc would never License the n reactor at Han lord today added Tom Buchanan of the environmental group Greenpeace. If anything were to happen it would be the same situation As the Plant in the soviet Union said researcher Pollock. They say it s different but it s basically the same thing it s Graphite and there s no  Bui Energy department official Mike Lawrence who oversees the Hanford nuclear reservation defended the operation. What we know is  n reactor has operated safely for s3 years and we i Hank that Sale operating history attests to its design Lawrence said noting that despite similarities tha reactor s design is no the same As the chernobyl facility. Besides Hanford Only one other . Reactor uses Graphite the commercially operated fart St. Iraln in Colorado whose design also differs from chernobyl s and whose Overall capacity is far smaller. Four other Graphite moderated units All military readers Al the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina operate without containment facilities any Plant that uses Graphite has a potential for lire Pollock said and the International nuclear Industry does not know How to handle a Graphite  further examination is needed on safety operations of the military structures she said but intuitively i feel like ii they Don t have a containment Structure they should t be  a push to More than double nuclear generating capacity by 1990 was underway when the worst Case happened. An explosion at the enormous Graphite moderated chernobyl Plant 80 Miles South of lha ukrainian capital of Kiev triggered a poisonous nuclear fire an Accident vastly worse than three mile Island. I i Hank the solve is brainwashed themselves into thinking there was no Chance of an Accident with their reactors said Philip Pryde an expert on soviet Energy Al san Diego state University. And when they had one they panicked Pryde said. They had to ask Wesl Germany How do you up out a nuclear reactor fire?1 they did t even know How. That s scary.". Or. Bennett Ramberg an expert in reactor safely at the Center for International and strategic Allars at the University of California at los Angeles said in terms of nuclear Power safely i d say the West germans Are first the americans in the Middle and the solve is  the soviets have Long been faulted for placing reactors near highly populated areas having inadequate Ava Callon plans and using what Western experts contend Are Cost saving but danger packed designs. The Soffel Union is the third largest producer of atomic Power ranking behind Only the United states and France. In 1954, the soviet Union became the first nation to use nuclear Energy to generate Alec Rocity for commercial use. Although initially slow to capitalize on its fast Start by the mid-1970s the soviets were into it Lull throttle. The Cia in a publication last january titled user Energy Atlas wrote untroubled by antinuclear protests and increasingly supported by a sizeable Industry dedicated to the manufacture of nuclear reactor components tha soviets now have Ona of tha most Active nuclear Power construction programs in the world.".  until the nuclear catastrophe at the the tour unit chernobyl Plant the soviets had about 50 reactors on line with a capacity of generating 29,000 megawatts a year double what it was five years ago according to the atomic Industrial forum a . Nuclear Trade group. In a new five year plan made Public last january the soviets announced plans to More than double the figure again raising generating capacity to about 70.000 megawatts by 1990. These projections now Likely in disarray would have raised ram 11 percent to about 20 percent the portion of electricity generated in the soviet Union by nuclear Power. In the United slates the figure is about 15 percent. A once rapid nuclear Power expansion program in the United slates which has 100 operating reactors the most in the world stowed Down dramatically alter the March 28,1379, Accident at the three mile stand Plant in Pennsylvania. The near meltdown at Tim rattled the United states and the rest of the world into re examining safety. While the United states took Stock o us program he soviet Union under pressure irom countries to whom it sought to Export atomic plants said it would build no new Graphite reactors. Instead ii said future new construction would Only involve pressurized water reactors. It said these units would have containment Walls. Bui it did not retrofit existing reactors with such Protection. Nor did it Stop Graphite units already under construction like the four at the chernobyl Plant Ihal came on line in the past five years. About half of All soviet reactors primarily the older ones Are both Graphite moderated and water cooled a relatively inexpensive design not used anywhere else Lor commercial Power. The now Cost carries some High dangers sex parts say. For one thing at temperatures above 1,093 degrees centigrade Graphite catches fire. At three mile Island nearly All the radiation was contained ins dry the Plant. The government concluded that the radiation that escaped was not enough to endanger the Public although some citizens Challenge this. Ii appears most ii not All of the chernobyl Plant s reactor radiation escaped raising Levels across Europe and prompting a number of protective Steps. Just three years ago soviet Energy official b. A. Semenov wrote a paper for the International atomic Energy Agency bulletin on nuclear Power in the soviet Union. Semenov a Deputy director of the International Agency who participated in the operation of the first soviet reactor said in his paper the Salty of nuclear Power plants in the soviet Union is assured by a very wide spectrum of measures including effective technical ones to prevent accidents to compensate for possible malfunctions and to decrease the consequences of possible  May 11, 1986 the stars and stripes Page 15