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Study of the Nuclear Disaster of Chernobyl

Study of the Nuclear Disaster of Chernobyl

The worst accident in the history of this nuclear power generation occurred on the morning of April 26, 1986. It was at the Chernobyl (Ukraine) nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. At 1:32AM Lieutenant Colonel Leonid Telyatnikov received a telephone call and was told that there was a fire at the nuclear power plant. There were many reasons their plant had backfired. These reasons included human error and poor plant design due to the cold war. Chernobyl was located in the former Soviet Union in what is now Ukraine. The area in and around Chernobyl is now a nuclear wasteland. People are not supposed to live in these areas, yet they still do, even with the danger of mutations and radiation sickness. For the people and countries affected by the radiation, this was a horrible, terrifying and angering experience. Villages were evacuated late and not many things were done in time to save lives and prevent more damages.

Countless errors were made at Chernobyl. The man in charge, an electrical engineer, was not a specialist in reactor plants. There were also the problems with the plant's organization and design. Due to the cold war, the Soviet Union had poor designs for nuclear plants. The sequence of events before the explosion is still unclear. Technicians attempted a poorly designed experiment, causing the chain reaction in the core to go out of control. The reactor's lid was blown off, and large amounts of radioactive material were released into the atmosphere. A partial meltdown of the core also occurred.

It is believed that for some strange reason, there was a loss of water that was used to cool 1,661 uranium fuel assemblies that were set in pressure pipes surrounded by 1,700 tons of graphite blocks, causing the fuel rods to overheat. The zirconium alloy around the fuel assemblies, along with the pressure tubing, melted at about 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit, overheating the graphite. The temperature rose still more. At 5,100 degrees Fahrenheit, the uranium-oxide fuel began to melt. The operators flooded the reactor with water. It was too late and the water was instantly turned into a superheated steam, which reacted with the graphite, fuel and zirconium to produce hydrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide. Over many hours, the gases built up and combined with oxygen...

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