II. Put the words from the box into the correct columns below. Translate them into Russian.

certainly, mixture, stainless, significant, quantity, reliable, present, importance, peaceful, academician, directly, founder, achievement, completely, fission, moderator, thermal

Noun (what / who?)	Adjective (what kind of)	Adverb (in what manner?)
measure damage …	………….	afterward (s) …. ….

III. Read text 2 a. Try to understand its content. Text 2 a. Atomic Energy

A man trying to see a single atom is like a man trying to see a single drop of water in the sea while life flying high above it. He will see the sea made up of a great many drops of water but he certainly will not be able to see a single drop. By the way, there are so many atoms in the drop of water that if one could count one atom a second, day and night, it would take one hundred milliard years. But that is certainly impossible.

Man has, however, learned the secret of the atom. He can split atoms in order to get great quantities of energy. At present, coal is the most important fuel and our basic source of energy. Coal and other fuel may be replaced by atomic energy. Atomic energy replacing the preset source of energy, the latter will be able to find various new applications. As for coal it is not only a fuel and it will therefore never lose its importance. We can’t do without it and it may find some other significant applications. For instance, coal will be used to get various products.

The nuclear reactor is to be one of the reliable “furnaces” producing atomic energy. Being used to produce energy, the reactor produces it in the form of heat. In other words, atoms splitting in the reactor, heat is developed. Gas, water, melted metals, and some other liquids circulating through the reactor must .carry that heat away. The heat may be carried to pipes of the steam generator containing water. The resulting steam drives a turbine, the turbine in. its turn driving an electric generator. So, we can see that a nuclear power station is likely any other power station but the familiar coal-burning furnace is replaced by a nuclear one.

The first industrial nuclear power station in the world was constructed in Obninsk not far from Moscow in 1954. One may mention here that the station in question was put into operation two years earlier than the British one and three and a half years earlier than the American nuclear power station.

Speaking of the peaceful uses of atomic energy in Russia, one can also mention Beloyarskaya nuclear power plant named after academician Кurchatov, one of the founders of the Russian atomic industry. There are two reactors and three turbines at Beloyarskaya nuclear power plant. The first reactor supplies energy to one turbine and the second one generates steam to drive two turbines of 100,000 kilowatts each. The energy generated by the above plants is supplied to the Urals industrial enterprises and transmitted to Central Russia. Russian scientists and engineers achieved a nuclear super-heating of steam directly in the reactor turbine which was achieved for the first time in the world. We might mention here another important achievement, that is, the first nuclear installation where the thermal energy generated in the reactor is transformed directly into electric energy.

And how do the reactors still operate? Let’s consider their design.

Nowadays there two types of nuclear rеасtors: thermal reactors and fast reactors. The thermal reactor is mainly used to generate electricity at the moment. There are several different designs of thermal reactor, but they are all fuelled by rods either of natural, uranium enriched with a higher than usual proportion of uranium 235. The rods are surrounded by a moderator, usually water or graphite. The moderator slows down the neutrons released by fisson until they reach the best speed for further reactions. Heat is given off during fission and this is carried away from the reactor core by a coolant. The heat contained in the coolant is applied to produce steam which powers a generator to make electricity. Rods of a material like boron, which absorbs neutrons, are lowered into the core of the reactor to control the speed of the reaction or to shut it off completely. The reactor core is surrounded by steel mid/or a thick shielding of concrete. Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs) are the most widely used reactors in the world.

In fast reactors, the fuel is so rich that fission can be caused by fast neutrons, so no moderator is needed to slow them down. Thermal reactors only use a small part of their fuel and they are not very good at using the plutonium that is a by-product of fission. Fast reactors are able to burn the plutonium much more efficiently. Fast reactor fuel is a mixture of plutonium and uranium dioxides in stainless steel cans. Packed around the core of the reactor is a blanket of uranium 238. The uranium 238 atoms capture a spare neutron and are changed into plutonium. Fast reactor can create as much plutonium as it uses and it can provide fuel for another reactor. The reactor core is very small and a great amount of heat is produced, Molten sodium is employed to carry away the heat. As they both burn and create plutonium, fast reactors can extract about sixty times as much power from natural uranium as thermal reactors can.