The Chernobyl Tragedy : A Safety Test For Reactor Four

Not many people fully know what happened at Chernobyl, or understand the effect it has had on today’s nuclear science. Chernobyl has been named as the largest man-made disaster ever recorded. Chernobyl is the most influential and important event during the 1980’s because it has completely changed how the world views anything nuclear by changing experimentation and usage of nuclear materials and power as a whole. It was extremely influential because it caused thousands of people to move out of their homes, while damaging nearby cities and countries and covering the surrounding area in radioactive smog, and is still a threat to surrounding cities and countries today. It also has caused the nearby area to be thriving with wildlife.

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.

On April 26, 1986, a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced a catastrophic meltdown that emitted radioactive material into the atmosphere, killing 31 people.

(1)At 1:23 am on April 26th 1986, 2 explosions devastated a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl. These explosions unleashed huge amounts of toxic radiation into the atmosphere. This radiation created a toxic plume of radiation that not only devastated Chernobyl but affected almost the whole of Europe. It started with total evacuation of the city, this started within 24 hours of the disaster and immediately an exclusion zone was in place. What the Ukrainian officials didn’t know at the time is just how serious this was. The wind blew the plumes created by this explosion one plume north and one plume west. The plumes were highly toxic and had been contaminated by the nuclear radiation. The radiation going west even reached north wales and many parts of Scotland and the south of Ireland. The radiation going north badly affected Finland, Sweden and parts of Norway. To put that into perspective the disaster released at least 100 times more radiation than the atom bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

On Saturday, 26 April 1986 a reactor at the Chernobyl Power Plant near Pripyat, Russia has a sudden power surge which caused mass damage. The Power Plant tried for immediate

The accident began about 4:00 a.m. on March 28, 1979, when there was failure in the secondary, non-nuclear section of the plant. The main feedwater pumps stopped running, which was caused by either a mechanical or electrical failure that prevented the steam generators from removing heat. First the turbine, then the reactor automatically shut down. Then the pressure in the primary

On January 3, 1961 at 9:01 PM the United States experienced what any believe the be the first nuclear reactor accident in world history (Adams, 1996). The US Army had commissioned a small reactor prototype to be built in the Idaho desert that surround Idaho Falls. They believed that they were isolated enough that they could conduct experiments with a small reactor that would mimic the conditions of the site they wished to have the reactor on while also allowing for a safety zone for the people in the nearby town. The reactor was a small three rod affair that did not have the shielding or the safety measures that would come in response to this accident (Stacy, 2000, 144).

April 25, 1986 was a normal day at the Chernobyl power plant. For weeks, the workers had been planning a routine shutdown to coincide with a test of nuclear reactor four. They were trying to determine how long the turbines would spin and supply power to the main circulating pumps following any loss of main electrical power (“Chernobyl Accident 1986”). This test was needed to verify that the cooling process on the reactor stayed in place even with no power because if

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

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

The day after the accident, the residents of Pripyat were told to evacuate to nearby cities. To avoid mass panic, they were not told about the severity of the explosion, and were promised that they would be back in their homes safe in a couple of days. They were told to bring nothing but necessities, as heavy luggage would hinder the attempt to evacuate. These people were also stopped from taking their pets and cattle along as their fur may have radioactive properties. The cattle may also be ineligible to be used for meat in eating, as it may have eaten radioactive food, and itself become unhealthy to eat. However,

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

for the next time they would be able to conduct would be in one year