that something must be done—but what? And as dense clouds of radionuclides continued to roil into the sky above Reactor Number Four, the experts assembled in the White House still could not agree on whether to evacuate Pripyat. The civil defense radiation scouts had been taking hourly readings on the streets of the city since noon, and they found the figures alarming: on Lesi Ukrainki Street, less than three kilometers from the reactor, by midafternoon, they had recorded readings of 0.5 roentgen an hour; by nightfall, it was up to 1.8 roentgen. This reading was tens of thousands of times
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