the heroic but doomed efforts of the plant operators to cool the shattered reactor core with water had resulted only in flooding the basement spaces of Units Three and Four with contaminated water and sending clouds of radioactive steam billowing into the atmosphere. In addition, there was the poisonous torrent of radioactive aerosols being carried into the air from the crater of Reactor Number Four—where the glowing lattice of fuel cells and the ominous spot of incandescence that Prushinsky had glimpsed suggested strongly that something was on fire. Somehow the blaze had to be put out and the
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