Chernobyl : The Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster

On the morning of April 26th 1986 the world experienced the worst nuclear and engineering disaster ever: the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl. Reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded due various reasons: the design of the reactor itself had a major flaw that would make it unstable when run at low power, and the employees responsible for running the reactor were inadequately trained. Leonid Toptunov, the

The disaster had more of an effect on eastern Europe’s nuclear experimentation and use but “While no-one in the West was under any illusion about the safety of early Soviet reactor designs, some lessons learned have also been applicable to Western plants” (World Nuclear Association). Since the Chernobyl disaster was majorly caused by human error and under qualified scientists, to work with nuclear reactors today you need to be insanely qualified. Since the accident, Soviet-designed reactors’ safety has improved greatly, even in smaller ways. Automatic shutdown mechanisms now work faster, and other safety mechanisms have been sped up. Even new equipment has been installed such as automated inspection equipment. Several scientist and reporters have even said an accident like Chernobyl is virtually impossible with today’s technology (World Nuclear Association).

This quote, which I obtained from the newspaper The Guardian’s website, is from Sasha Yuvchenko, a former employee at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. What he didn’t know at the time of the event he was describing was that he had just experienced the worst nuclear explosion in history.

April 26th 1986 over five million people were involved in an nuclear disaster known as Chernobyl. Many causes were lead in the disaster, strong elements that were the worst were iodine-131 cesium-137 and strontium-90 (Nuclear Institution). The first to die were two workers one was killed from the explosion itself and one from a heart attack (Lallanilla Marc).

Cs-137 results from the natural decay chain of Uranium-235. Cs-137 has a half-life of 30 years which would account for the high levels after the decrease in discharge from Sellafield and is problematic due to ease with which it spreads throughout nature due to the high solubility of Caesium salts. This ease of spreading makes it difficult to clean up radionuclides such as Cs-137 and poses dangers to both aquatic wildlife and humans as ingesting the isotope can lead to exposure to gamma and beta radiation. Small amounts of Cs-137 were also released in the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 which would also correspond to the above background levels after the discharge from Sellafield decreased and would fit the timescale identified by the Sellafield

Memories are fleeting, it’s difficult to believe with certainty that what you remember is what happened, whether they morph or are forgotten as time passes. Significant memories often linger longer than mundane ones, although both can fade in time. That is why it’s important to remember things even when they’re painful. Voices From Chernobyl has several monologues that deal with the struggle of remembering their trauma, even when the don’t want to. For some, these painful memories became a part of them so they chose to immortalize these memories through their work. Other wanted to forget but, that brings up the question of whether it’s better to remember or to forget.

radioactive nuclides from spreading. Coupled with their slower response time and lack of high quality equipment, their rescuing was slowed down and not as productive as it could have been. More lives could have been helped with advanced equipment and proper attire.

The power plant was built next to the city of Pripyat, which had a population of fifty thousand people in 1986 (World Nuclear Association). “The Chernobyl plant used four Soviet-designed RBMK-1000 nuclear reactors— a design that is now universally recognized as incoherently flawed” says Lallanilla,“In most nuclear reactors, where water is used as a coolant and to moderate the reactivity of the nuclear core, as the core heats up and produces more steam, the increase in steam bubbles or ‘voids’ in the water reduces the reactivity in the nuclear core. This is an important safety feature found in most reactors built in the United States and other Western nations.” Irresponsibly, “operators disabled the plant equipment including automatic shutdown mechanisms the day before the disaster when they were to perform routine maintenance on reactor number four” says sources from the U.N. Scientific Committee on the effects of Atomic Radiation (Lallanilla). Recorded at 1:23 on April 26, extremely hot nuclear fuel rods were disengaged into cooling water. This created a large amount of steam that exceeded the reactivity in the nuclear core of reactor number four. This power surge caused an “immense explosion that detached the one thousand ton plate that was covering the reactor’s core” (Lallanilla). Thus, releasing radiation into the atmosphere and cutting off the flow of

April 26 1986, the chernobyl nuclear plant exploded due to an inherent flaw in the reactors and a disabled automatic shutdown mechanism. This led to radioactive fallout, radiation poisoning, and poisoning the surrounding environment for 20,000 years

Uranium, which is the ninety-second element on the periodic table, is a very interesting element. The radioactive uranium is used in atomic bombs. Also, people use it in what is called nuclear power, an energy source that fourteen percent of the world uses. (NPR 3) In a nuclear power plant, a process called fission that uses uranium is used to generate power. During fission, each uranium atom is bombarded by neutrons, causing each uranium atom to turn into one atom of barium, one atom of krypton, and three neutrons. These three neutrons bombard other uranium atoms, resulting in more neutrons being produced and creating a chain reaction. Each time the uranium atom split, energy is released. The leftover atoms are called nuclear waste.

On April 26, 1986 at 1:23 AM, a chain reaction in the core of Unit 4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in the then-Soviet Union resulted in an initial explosion having a force of between 30 and 40 tons of TNT. The explosion came as a result of an ill-planned experiment, where the pumps from the plant’s emergency water cooling systems were shut down.

There have been lots of nuclear accident around the world. One of the accident that had a major impact on the world was the Chernobyl disaster. The disaster took place on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. The disaster was caused by a reaction explosion induced by design faults and staff application errors. The accident took place in the course of scheduled tests to check the power supply mode in the event of external sources loss. Even after 10 days, explosions and ejections of radioactive substances continued. The release of radiation and radioactive substance polluted the places within 30 km of Chernobyl, and those areas have been closed for a long period of

Early in the morning of April 27, 1986, the world experienced its largest nuclear disaster ever (Gould 40). While violating safety protocol during a test, Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl power plant was placed in a severely unstable state, and in a matter of seconds the reactor output shot up to 120 times the rated output (Flavin 8). The resulting steam explosion tossed aside the reactor’s 1,000 ton concrete covering and released radioactive particles up to one and a half miles into the sky (Gould 38). The explosion and resulting fires caused 31 immediate deaths and over a thousand injuries, including radiation poisoning (Flavin 5). After the

The Chernobyl accident was a disastrous nuclear event that happened on 26th April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine. The Chernobyl disaster is classified as a level 7 event according to the International Nuclear Event Scale (only two events have been classified this high in the past) and has caused damages that consist of the cost of 500,000 workers and 18 billion rubles, 31 deaths according to the Soviet casualty count (this is still being disputed) and between 4000-27000 affected future deaths due to radiation exposure [G1].

The main reason for the mishap is by now well recognized (Petryna 1). However, initially the Chernobyl catastrophe baffled the minds of people in the 20th century and definitely left the people of Ukraine disordered while living in anxiety. Now, without question, the public knows that the accident at Chernobyl was the result of a disastrous combination of ignorance from the Ukrainians and complacency from the Soviets in control of Ukraine at the time. As according to American physicist and Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, “…the Chernobyl disaster tells us about the deficiencies of the Soviet political and administrative system rather than about problems with nuclear power." The immediate basis of the Chernobyl accident was a mismanaged electrical-engineering experiment (Rhodes "Chernobyl", PBS). While, the indirect source of the calamity was an industrial malfunction of a Soviet made nuclear-based machine. Ironically, the Chernobyl accident occurred during a test run, which was conducted to improve plant safety. This accident proved once more what experienced control engineers have all learned: that a process must be understood before it can be controlled. (Liptak “Control Global”). Engineers with no familiarity of reactor physics were interested to see if they could draw electricity from the turbine generator of the Number 4 reactor unit to run water pumps during an emergency, when the turbine was no longer being driven by the reactor but was