CONTAINMENT AND ITS ABSENCE

GRAPHIC: A10_8203.TIF

The drawing above, published in Sotsialisticheskaya industriya, 10 Feb. 82, shows the Rostov (USSR) nuclear plant now under construction. There are no cooling towers (presumably the heat will go into the River Don), but an innovation is visible: containment buildings to contain the radioactivity in case of an accident. Previously it was assumed that accidents don't happen in the Soviet Union or its colonies: The photos below show the nuclear plant at Jaslovske Bohunice, Czechoslovakia, without a containment building (left), and the thinly walled-in reactor vessel standing directly in the machine hall (right). The Soviet plant supplied to Finland had no containment, and the Finns had to have it built by Western companies. That plant is popularly known as "Eastinghouse."