RBMK

Many Russian political heads have claimed, “RBMK plants…will never be built again,” largely due to safety concerns of the past and current reactors [10]. As discussed previously the RBMK’s had several reactor features that made it difficult to justify their operation. Most importantly, the reactors generated excess neutrons during operation which upon further study led to the super criticality that caused the Chernobyl explosion. While Russia suggests that the explanation of the plants failure was

The industrial expansion of the Soviet Union resulted in one of the greatest economic growths for a single country that the modern world has ever seen. This economic growth ultimately led to the USSR becoming one of the world’s only two superpowers in the post-WWII era. Much of the country’s economic growth occurred because of the USSR’s use of a command economy, which is “an economy in which production, investment, prices, and incomes are determined centrally by a government” [1]. Using a command

To start off with, what is a disaster? Well, a disaster is a natural or man-made hazard resulting in an event of substantial extent causing significant physical damage or destruction, loss of life, or drastic change to the environment. Thus, an engineering disaster is a disaster that is caused by an error an engineer has made in the production of the product or service. Committing a mistake is part of being human. Unfortunately for engineers, due to the importance of their job in creating products

The Chernobyl Power Complex, located about 130 km north of Kiev, Ukraine, and about 20 km south of the border with Belarus, consisted four RBMK-1000 nuclear reactors. The first two units were constructed between 1970 and 1977, while the later were completed in 1983. The RBMK-1000 was a Soviet designed and built graphite moderated pressure tube type reactor, using water as a coolant which also provided the steam to drive the turbine. The graphite moderator is designed to slow down neutrons to raise

2011). Anatolii Aleksandrov was blamed for being accountable for holding too many authoritative positions at the same time when Chernobyl explosion occurred. Additionally, he was blamed for avoiding complaints concerning operational complications with RBMKs (light water-cooled, graphite moderated reactors) as he was the head of Interdepartmental Technical Council MVTS, which was the most authoritative decision-making organization for Soviet nuclear energy guiding principles (Schmid, 2011). Before 1986

Engineering Disaster Newton’s third law of motion states that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; this law is not only applied in our studies but in our daily lives. For engineers, this is a law to live by; reminding each engineer that each of his/her actions will have an equal consequence whether it is good or bad. Engineers are trusted and respected individuals who represent not only themselves but the profession as a whole; their title gives them a great responsibility and

The Chernobyl Disaster was not meant to happen at all, what was supposed to happen was an experiment to see if the reactor’s own electrical needs could be supplied by a freewheeling turbine in the event of a power outage, but the experiment did not go as it was planned. This experiment gone wrong caused so much radiation sickness to the people, which lead to death by sickness, or death by cancer. The people who lived ended up having children with many mutations and disabilities. The Soviet Union

On April 26, 1986 the entire world’s view of nuclear energy changed forever (Nave Chernobyl, n.d., para. 4). This was because on that day there was a massive explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine (part of the USSR at the time). Science can be applied to this event to explain why the plant exploded in the first place. Science can be used to look at how the plant was designed to work versus how it worked at the time of explosion. This event had massive health effects on nearby humans

Three Mile Island The Three Mile Island was a devastating nuclear power plant accident that occurred on March 28, 1979, beginning at 4 a.m near Middletown, Pennsylvania. It all started with a malfunction in the secondary, non-nuclear section of the plant. There was a failure that prevented the pumps from sending water down to the core to cool the hot, blazing core. This caused many things in the plant to shut down, so to try and reduce the pressure the operator opened a relief

Nuclear waste The problem with nuclear waste is getting worse everyday while we try and find a solution to dispose of the waste properly, however there are some people who think that the nuclear waste project for waste disposal is not that serious and it does not have an affect on the environment, but they are wrong because our lack of care for proper disposal of nuclear waste is having a tole on the environment where the waste is buried and the life forms around these waste sites. Nuclear