jidar
04-26-2006, 10:39 AM
On this day in History: April 26th
1986: Reactor #4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Pripyat, Ukraine goes out of control and causes the worlds only nuclear meltdown to seriously breach containment. Only one other nucelar meltdown, known as the Windfall incident, ever breached containment, and it wasn't that serious. The Chernobyl meltdown was initially blamed on human error, but today we know that poor reactor design was also partly to blame.
A nuclear meltdown is not an explosion, it is a runaway reaction whereas the core material burns out of control and melts. The majority of danger from a meltdown comes primarily from the intense heat it produces which can destroy the containment facility thus releasing the nuclear material into the surrounding area.
In Chernobyl, this is exactly what happened. When the meltdown began the intense heat caused fires and steam explosions (water was the primary coolant as in most reactors) which damaged the facility and released a plume of radioactive fallout which drifted over Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, but also the European part of Turkey, Moldova, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark ,Norway, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Poland, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, France and the United Kingdom. Large areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were badly contaminated, resulting in the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people. This cloud was god damned huge people, but thankfully it wasn't too concentrated outside of the Ukraine.
The handling of the disaster is the poster child for mis-management. Due to the Soviets culture of always trying to hide everything and pretend like they were perfect, they didn't make it immediately known to the local response workers the dangers they were dealing with. As a result most of the first responder fire fighters, plant workers and police would die of radiation poisoning in the comming weeks. The local residents were also told that their evacuation was temporary and not that serious which is why most buildings in Pripyt look like someone just got up and left a few minutes ago. I hear it's pretty creepy actually.
Anyway, it would be a full day before the rest of the world even knew something had happened, and it was the Swedes who would point it out when they were trying to discover the source of excess radioactive dust at one of their own nuclear plants.
The Soviets built a containment sarcophogus around the plant, but it was done hastily and poorly, and today the sarcophogus is falling apart and leaks when it rains, due to this groundwater is still regularly contaminated by the nuclear fuel that remains within.
Amazingly, despite being of the same design, the other reactors at the site continued to be used for years, and the last reactor wasn't actually shut down until November 2000.
1986: Reactor #4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Pripyat, Ukraine goes out of control and causes the worlds only nuclear meltdown to seriously breach containment. Only one other nucelar meltdown, known as the Windfall incident, ever breached containment, and it wasn't that serious. The Chernobyl meltdown was initially blamed on human error, but today we know that poor reactor design was also partly to blame.
A nuclear meltdown is not an explosion, it is a runaway reaction whereas the core material burns out of control and melts. The majority of danger from a meltdown comes primarily from the intense heat it produces which can destroy the containment facility thus releasing the nuclear material into the surrounding area.
In Chernobyl, this is exactly what happened. When the meltdown began the intense heat caused fires and steam explosions (water was the primary coolant as in most reactors) which damaged the facility and released a plume of radioactive fallout which drifted over Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, but also the European part of Turkey, Moldova, Lithuania, Finland, Denmark ,Norway, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Poland, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, France and the United Kingdom. Large areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were badly contaminated, resulting in the evacuation and resettlement of over 336,000 people. This cloud was god damned huge people, but thankfully it wasn't too concentrated outside of the Ukraine.
The handling of the disaster is the poster child for mis-management. Due to the Soviets culture of always trying to hide everything and pretend like they were perfect, they didn't make it immediately known to the local response workers the dangers they were dealing with. As a result most of the first responder fire fighters, plant workers and police would die of radiation poisoning in the comming weeks. The local residents were also told that their evacuation was temporary and not that serious which is why most buildings in Pripyt look like someone just got up and left a few minutes ago. I hear it's pretty creepy actually.
Anyway, it would be a full day before the rest of the world even knew something had happened, and it was the Swedes who would point it out when they were trying to discover the source of excess radioactive dust at one of their own nuclear plants.
The Soviets built a containment sarcophogus around the plant, but it was done hastily and poorly, and today the sarcophogus is falling apart and leaks when it rains, due to this groundwater is still regularly contaminated by the nuclear fuel that remains within.
Amazingly, despite being of the same design, the other reactors at the site continued to be used for years, and the last reactor wasn't actually shut down until November 2000.