In the Las Vegas Valley, local officials are opening up cooling stations Tuesday to give residents a place to beat the heat.

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It is extremely difficult to measure weather consistently over decades and centuries, but the presence of sites reporting cooling is a symptom of the local variations that can creep in, according to researchers.

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At the Satsop site, two giant cooling towers still stand unmolested, and a local community college, Centralia, occasionally uses one of these structures to host an energy conference.

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While the smallest eruptions have caused only minor local disruptions, the larger ones have entered passing fronts, cooling temperatures, altering air pressure, and increasing precipitation.

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So to fix the problem, the town could have required the company to buy expensive cooling equipment, but that would have hurt the local economy.

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As of 14:00 local time (05:00 GMT) on Friday, the temperature of water inside the cooling pool at reactor 3 was 15.1C, well below the safety limit of 65C, Tepco said.

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The local business operates from about 133 service centres in 31 countries and rents out products ranging from small generators to large cooling plants.

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