Chernobyl: The Nuclear Disaster Part 1

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Chernobyl: The Nuclear Disaster

From Yuviverse, 

Hello everybody, I am back with a new topic for Yuviverse. This time, I have tried to combine Science and History to make our topic more interesting. Then, let's begin, shall we?

At 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine exploded, creating what many consider the worst nuclear disaster the world has ever seen. Even after many unanswered questions about the Chernobyl accident. Especially, regarding the long-term health impacts that the massive radiation leak will have on those who were exposed.


The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is located about 81 miles north of the city of Kyiv, Ukraine and about 12 miles south of the border with Belarus. It consists of four reactors that were designed and built during the 1970s and 1980s. A manmade reservoir, roughly 22 square kilometres in size was created to provide cooling water for the reactor. The newly built city of Pripyat was the nearest town to the power plant at just under 2 miles away and housed almost 50,000 people in 1986. A smaller and older town, Chernobyl, was about 9 miles away and home to about 12,000 residents. The remainder of the region was primarily farms and forests.

The Chernobyl plant used four Soviet-designed RBMK-1000 nuclear reactors. RBMK reactors were of a pressure tube design that used an enriched U-235 uranium dioxide fuel to heat water, creating steam that drives the reactor turbines and generates electricity. In most nuclear reactors, water is also used as a coolant and to moderate the reactivity of the nuclear core by removing the excess heat and steam. But the RBMK-1000 used graphite to moderate the core's reactivity and to keep a continuous nuclear reaction occurring in the core. 

The explosion occurred on April 26, 1986, during a routine maintenance check, according to the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR). Operators were planning on testing the electrical systems when they turned off vital control systems, going against the safety regulations. This caused the reactor to reach dangerously unstable and low-power levels. Reactor 4 had been shut down the day before to perform maintenance checks on safety systems during potential power outages. The reasons believed to cause the explosion are first due to excess steam and second influenced by hydrogen. The excess steam was created by the reduction of the cooling water which caused steam to build up in the cooling pipes. Which caused an enormous power surge that the operators could not shut down. The explosion occurred at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, destroying reactor 4 and initiating a booming fire. Toxic fumes and dust were carried by the blowing wind, bringing fission products and the noble gas inventory with it. The explosions killed two plant workers and several others within a few hours of the accident. The initial fire was controlled around 5 a.m., but the resulting graphite-fueled fire took 10 days and 250 firefighters to extinguish it.



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