Reactor

BARTALOMEYEVKA, U.S.S.R. -- Doors bang with the wind. Fences have fallen around the village's stout houses. The post office, the school, the community center are all padlocked. And yellowed weeds, some shoulder high, wave in the fields where Bartalomeyevka's farmers grew rye, potatoes and vegetables.Bartalomeyevka is a modern ghost town -- it was killed by radiation.Home to more than 3,000 people just five years ago, it is one of the hundreds of villages in the western Soviet Union that was abandoned after clouds of radioactive particles from the April 26, 1986, explosion at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station passed overhead and made the villages uninhabitable.

GREAT NECK, N.Y. -- Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory are dismayed at the Department of Energy's decision to permanently close an aging nuclear reactor that has been shut since 1996, but environmentalists praised the move."

BEIJING - North Korea demanded yesterday that the United States and other nations give it money to build a light-water nuclear reactor before it will end its nuclear weapons program, a condition that appeared to undermine prospects for a breakthrough in the talks. The demand, made during the second day of six-nation nuclear talks, suggested that the North Korean regime was coming up with fresh obstacles to signing a broadly worded commitment to denuclearize, the main goal of the negotiations.

MOSCOW (AP) -- The fire that destroyed part of the roof of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant did not cause injuries or a radiation leak, the government said yesterday, but it was certain to intensify calls to shut down the plant.The blaze Friday night, which also forced the shutdown of a nuclear reactor, was the worst accident at the Ukrainian plant since the 1986 disaster that spewed radiation throughout Europe."We cannot sit on this powder keg any longer," Vladimir Yavorivsky, head of a Ukrainian parliamentary commission on Chernobyl, told reporters in Kiev, 80 miles south of Chernobyl.

Iraq's small stock of highly enriched reactor fuel has not been diverted to build a nuclear weapon, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported yesterday. The announcement, which followed a technical examination of the Iraqi uranium by international experts, seemed likely to quash speculation that Baghdad might have built a nuclear explosive device using the reactor fuel.The fuel, 27.6 pounds of 93-percent-pure uranium 235, was salvaged from Iraq's Osirak research reactor in 1981 after an Israeli air raid destroyed the reactor.

PHILADELPHIA -- The Peach Bottom nuclear power plant's Unit 3 reactor in York County, Pa., which was restarted May 10 after a six-day maintenance shutdown, has returned to full power, Philadelphia Electric Co. said yesterday.The plant's Unit 2 was unaffected and continued to operate at full power.The company said the Peach Bottom reactor, which is on the Susquehanna River several miles north of the Maryland-Pennsylvania line, was brought to full power on Saturday.

When scientists at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in Princeton, N.J., turned on the lab's experimental nuclear fusion reactor earlier this month, the event was comparable to the Wright brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk or the first time humans rubbed sticks together to make fire. The demonstration of nuclear fusion -- the same reaction that powers the sun's interior -- raised scientists' hopes of someday harnessing an inexhaustible, clean source of energy.Unlike the commercial fission reactors now in use to generate electricity, a fusion reactor would produce no dangerous radioactive wastes or pose a threat to the environment in the event of a catastrophic failure.

WASHINGTON - Government inspectors went to the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant this week to examine a cooling system malfunction that caused the Unit 2 nuclear reactor to shut down briefly Jan. 23. But plant and Calvert County officials said there was no cause for alarm in the shutdown and the inspection, which will last for a week, is routine. "There was no threat to surrounding areas, and there were no public health and safety consequences," said Neil A. Sheehan, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which dispatched inspectors to the Lusby plant Tuesday.

CHERNOBYL, Ukraine -- Nearly eight years after the Chernobyl meltdown, Ukrainian scientists have found that strontium-90 is leaching into the ground water and may reach Ukraine's most important water reservoir within a few years.The radioactive strontium is carried into the earth by rain and snow that penetrates the concrete-and-steel sarcophagus built in late 1986 to entomb the exploded Chernobyl Unit 4 nuclear reactor.Because of gaping cracks in the sarcophagus roof, about 820,000 gallons of precipitation have infiltrated the reactor building, according to new estimates by the Ukrainian state committee for nuclear and radiation safety.

Nearly three months after a reactor explosion that injured five of its workers, Condea Vista resumed production at its South Baltimore plant late yesterday.Condea Vista, which makes a key ingredient in household cleaners, received the state's permission to start up the plant after signing a consent decree Dec. 24 with the Maryland Department of the Environment.In the decree, the chemical manufacturer admitted to illegally discharging visible emissions, failing to take reasonable precautions to prevent the accident and creating a public nuisance.