Chernobyl, What Happened
On April 1986, Soviet's Union Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded letting out a massive amount of radiation that would debate of all Russian citizens for hundreds of years to come. At exactly 1:21 Am. on April 1986 in Chernobyl, a city near the Pripiat River the No. 4 reactor exploded and released thirty to forty times the radiation of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombing. The exact causes of the explosion are not known, however scientists and researchers, under thorough investigation, have uncovered possible causes to the explosion. The main reason why the explosion occurred was that, the operators of the plant were attempting to conduct an experiment with the emergency cooling system turned ...
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plant should make in case it goes out of control. Turning of the cooling system was an unnecessary action and though it did not cause the explosion, it made the consequences more fatal. Just then the operator's receive a call from the local grid controller in Kiev, who needed the power and asked the technicians to stop lowering it, at what they obeyed. Once that was done the reactor was running with out the cooling system, which was a very serious mistake. At 11:10 p.m. the grid controller said he no longer needed the power, and the operators returned to reducing the power. At twenty minutes past midnight the operators forgot to set the regulator properly, it was the second fatal error. Because of the incorrect regulator settings the reactor's power crashed to 30 MW from 1,000 MW, which is too low for the test. At that point the operators would have abandoned the experiment, but they attempted to rescue it, for the next time they would be able to conduct would be in one year only. ...
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thousand tone roof of the reactor blew off sky high, and brought down the giant two hundred tone refueling crane onto the core, destroying more cooling systems and 30 fires spread around the plant. Finally the over-heating and steam build up caused a second explosion which destroyed the reactor and part of the building. The graphite began to burn ferociously once exposed to air, as corereached temperatures as high as 2,800o F a massive amount of radioactive dust was let out into the air which was picked by winds and carried thousands of miles into every direction. As well, previous to the testing the technicians, drew up plans, but did not discuss them with physicists or nuclear safety ...
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