The Effect of Technology on the Environment

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

At both the Three Mile Island plant and the one in Japan were both mechanical, the devastating one in Chernobyl was caused by a human error.

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

The public commonly counters nuclear because of the threat of a meltdown; however, meltdowns are rare and extreme circumstances that the nuclear power field is prepared to handle. Chernobyl has become one of the most frequently used arguments against the safety factor of nuclear energy, however there are critical pieces of the puzzle that the public overlooks. The first piece being that the design of the reactor was one-hundred percent of the design was of Soviet origin, which differed greatly from European and American designs (“Chernobyl Accident 1986”). Along with the design, improper training of Soviet personnel and Soviet approved testing directly contributed to the reactor’s failure (“Chernobyl Accident 1986”). One flawed aspect of the testing was that plant personnel where instructed to disable the automatic shutdown features that were in

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

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.

There were many things wrong with the reactors at Chernobyl and Chernobyl itself. All four of the reactors were pressurized water reactors that should have been able to last up to fifty years each. Reactor number four needed a safety test so they did the test while the plant was still running when the test was designed to be done during a full plant shut down. The people that designed the test were not specialists in reactors and the people running the test were not familiar on how to do it.

Tsunamis, forest fires, and hurricanes are all examples of possible disasters, but none of these events have been anything like the disaster of Chernobyl. Chernobyl was a nuclear mistake that had taken place on the date of April 26th 1986 in Ukraine, and is known for when the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant explosion released radioactive contamination all over. This nuclear explosion lead to deaths, evacuations, and abandon cities. Each place affected by this disaster experienced pure chaos due to the short notice to leave their homes, family and friends behind. Chernobyl to this day has impacted the world by alerting people of the widespread possible dangers such as health, environmental, economic and radiation issues.

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.

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

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

The disaster took place on April 1986, and was caused by inexperienced staff. When the power plant had to undergo a special test, to make sure that sufficient amount of cooling water would be supplied to the reactor in case of a power outage. However, the test had been delayed, because the national grid required the power output more than the expected time. Hence, the test was postponed after midnight where the night shift had to come. The night shift had little experience about such a test as most of them were electrical engineers rather than nuclear. On the other hand, the night shift had to perform the test before the grid needed the power again, otherwise they would have all been fined or fired. Consequently, lead to an unnecessary pressure on the personnel, which in turn increased the probability of making incorrect

On April 26th, 1986, the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine dramatically changed the world 's opinion about using nuclear reaction for power. At 1:23am, reactor four exploded, releasing more than a hundred times the radiation of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Rosenberg, 2014). As a result of the incident and producing fire, large amounts of radioactive material were consequently released into the environment. The accident caused the largest uncontrolled radioactive release into the environment ever recorded for any civilian operation, and large quantities of radioactive substances were released into the air for about 10 days. This caused serious social and economic disruption for large populations in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine (Chernobyl Accident, 2014). While the radiological impact from this disaster was minimal outside of Russian and Ukraine, it did bring to light the risks associated with the use of nuclear energy across the global stage. Over the next sixteen years, world leaders devoted their attention to conducting reactor safety studies, as well as improving emergency preparedness for public workers and these industries.

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

Technology has changed so many of the ways in which we live our lives, from the invention of the wheel to the advanced systems we use and take for granted everyday. Technology was once taboo in most house holds while people still clung to the idea that life was built on life experiences. Nicholas Carr stated in, Is Goggle making us stupid? "Back in the fourth century, BCE, Plato complained that writing (then a fairly new technology) was destroying peoples memory, yet he wrote dozens of books. For half a century, television has been accused of rotting our brains and making us fat and lazy, but most people depend on it for info, news and entertainment." Technology has changed our understanding of the way things work and