Health and the Chernobyl Disaster Essay

First, as mentioned above, failure to mention reactors design flaws led to distrust in the infrastructure of the Soviet Union. While many scientists and researchers such as Valeri Legasov had noticed that there were issues with the reactors design prior to the disaster, and mentioned so in personal journals, the discovery of their failure to speak up lead to the questioning of Soviet leadership [5]. Additionally, these issues became worse upon the discovery of KGB classified documents that discussed various issues with the construction of the Chernobyl plant between 1971 and 1988 [7]. These compounding issues identified flaws

On April 26, 1986, at Chernobyl power plant, in Ukraine, testing was being conducted on reactor 4 to see how the reactor would cope with lower power output. After testing was complete, one of the operators forgot to reset the power outage to the 30% standard requirement, therefore it caused a devastating chain of events to occur. Water flow to the reactor increased to counteract the lack of power and radiation building up which was trying to cool the system. The water created large

There are currently over 435 commercial nuclear power reactors operable in 31 countries, and about 70 more reactors are under construction. According to World Nuclear Organization, fourteen of them have been classified as accidents where the public has been exposed to large amounts of radiation. The most devastating of these incidents was the core meltdown of reactor 4 at Chernobyl, better known as the Chernobyl disaster. Today, I am going to tell three things about the Chernobyl. First, I am going to tell you what the Chernobyl disaster was. Second, why the explosion happened. Lastly, what the Chernobyl was after the explosion.

Chernobyl never should have happened. Out of all nuclear disasters chernobyl is the worst. The day it happened they were doing a one time shutdown. Nobody knew that the day they shut down it would explode. The reason it exploded is because the shutdown was to practice in case they lost power. Then as they were doing everything by hand then the rods jammed and the rods couldn't cool. The rods got so hot without the water they started to steam then they exploded with the whole plant. There is four hundred times the amount of radiation than an atomic bomb.

On the afternoon of April 26th, the staffs of the Chernobyl nuclear plant were about to do testing on the fourth unit of the nuclear facility, and ultimately the unit that caused the destruction of the plant. They were testing safety features of certain hardware to see if the system could run for a minute in the catastrophic event of total power failure. (Leatherbarrow) The purpose of the pumps and steam turbine system that was being tested was to keep the reactor having cool water flow to the core continuously. Without a constant water flow to cool the core, the reactor itself would ultimately melt down.

The Chernobyl Disaster happened on April 26, 1986. Like most engineering disasters it could have been prevented without knowing that the disaster would happen. During a night safety test, operators decided to test the constraints of the nuclear system. After terminating all safety systems, including removing the control rods, they began to test the reaction. Some investigators believe that the staff thought the safety regulations to be foolish. They weren't aware of the dangers of a meltdown. The incident began to run out of control during a shift swap. The electrical engineers who began the reaction left the regular staff in charge. They expected the other engineers would arrive at the midnight shift. After the reaction began to run

In the Chernobyl power plant, reactor 4 was due for a “one-time shutdown to perform routine maintenance.” The power plant had four reactors of Soviet-designed RBMK-1000, a design that has proven to be flawed. These reactors use uranium fuel rods that are lowered into the core holding cooled water, creating large amounts of steam that drive the turbines therefore

On April 26 1986, the fourth unit of 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was to close down for a schedule maintenance check. During this operation, a test was decided to experiment the capability of the equipment to establish enough power to operate the reactor core cooling system. This

April 26th 1986 marked the date of the worst nuclear accident to ever occur. Chernobyl, a nuclear power plant in Russia was undergoing routine safety tests that envolved running the reactor on less then full power, followed by a standard shut down. At Chernobyl’s reactor number 4 a specific test was designed to show that a coasting turbine could produce enough power to pump coolant through the reactor core while waiting for electricity from diesel generators.

The Chernobyl incident continues to demonstrate the risks involved with nuclear power, as well as the consequences of any failure. Simple human error led to a chain reaction that caused the reactor core to melt down. The resulting explosion spewed clouds of radiation into the atmosphere that quickly spread. Kasperski states, “The explosion of reactor Unit 4 on April 26, 1986 led to heavy radioactive contamination of regions of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia” (Kasperski 44). With no way of containing the radiation, the toxic cloud quickly spread throughout Europe. Nazaryan explains, "The toxic cloud that enveloped much of Europe....contained: cesium-137, iodine-131, zirconium-95...." (Nazaryan 4). What made matters worse is that the public didn’t know about the accident until two days after the explosion occurred. This resulted in thousands of civilians unknowingly exposing themselves to potentially life-threatening levels of radiation. While the radioactive cloud eventually dispersed into the atmosphere, the same cannot be said about the radiation absorbed by the ground

Nuclear power plants being so defenseless and having such a high rate for accident. The words accident and contamination flashed, in her head, like a weather bulletin. It was a regular day the kids had left for school and Shina was just straightening up around the house. She heard a loud weird siren coming from the nuclear power plant. One of the nuclear cores had over heated and the town was being evacuated. Chernobyl “suffered the worst accident, “on April 26, 1986, the reactor blew like a ton of dynamite sending the “top of the reactor” in to the air, and containments “buried” in the “biosphere for days” (Lewis 25). The containments buried in the air, which was harmful to people’s health. The contamination in the air would spread to other places, and cause damage

Moreover, The first mistake made at the Chernobyl nuclear plant was not following the regulations. In the nuclear plant, the power input was supposed to be set from seven hundred to one thousand megawatts. However, the deputy chief engineer that was in charge wanted to save the amount of water to cool down the nuclear reactor after a test was completed, and not allow the reactor to overheat. He insisted that the input should be no more than two hundred megawatts. The

The disaster at Chernobyl didn’t transpire just from one factor but rather from several factors. One of the factors was a psychological bias, more specifically overconfidence. It made sense for the plant to run a test on the reactor; it’s a part of maintainability. However, they made a poor choice in shutting off the emergency core cooling system. They failed to think about what would happen if the test failed in such a way that it really needed the emergency core cooling system, which it ironically did. They were too confident in thinking that the test would go as planned. Similar tests were conducted in 1982, 1984, and 1985 all of which failed (CNN IReport). They felt that they could redeem themselves by running the test one more time in 1986. Most likely, this was a key motivation in making this test as successful as possible. Another factor was human factors, more specifically poorly conducted operation. It seemed as soon as one thing in the operation started to go wrong, it just started a chain reaction of poor decisions. The power of the reactor at the beginning of the test should have been “about 700-1000 MWt prior to shutdown, but possibly due to

In order to understand the Chernobyl accident 1986, we must understand a little bit about the background of the Chernobyl power complex and the surrounding area. The Chernobyl power complex sat about 210 miles north of Kiev, Ukraine and somewhere around 32 miles south of the Belarus border. The power complex consisted of a total of four RBMK-1000 nuclear reactors and at the time of the accident two more reactors where being built nearby. Reactors one and two were built between 1970 and 1977. The third and fourth reactors were built in 1983. The plant also consisted of a man-made lake that covered some 35 square miles that was built to supply cooling water to the reactors.

At 1:23 AM on April 26, 1986, a safety test that should have been routine ended in disaster (Rybar, Vickery). The Chernobyl plant, “poorly built” by the Soviet Union, faced such quick destruction that two hours later, some employees still had no idea what had happened (Rybar).