CHERNOBYL: A WORLD DISASTER

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CHERNOBYL: A WORLD DISASTER

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.1 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 off, they made six fatal errors which
sealed
everyone's fate. Soviet officials clamed that if the technicians, would
have avoided at least one of those mistakes, then the plant could have
been saved.
The technicians began the test one day before the explosion. They
started reducing the reactor's power level so they could run the turbine
experiment.
However in order for the plant to run at lower power they had to turn off
the automatic control system, which powered all emergency limitations that
the
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. The senior authorities who had ordered the test
would
have been furious and would have found out the regulator problem. So the
operators decided, to pull out the stops to restore the reactor's power.2
Their
third fatal mistake, was the pullin

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