Photo: SERGEY SUPINSKI / AFP / Getty Images
In the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, 32 people died and dozens more suffered radiation burns in the first days of the crisis, but only after the Swedish authorities reported the consequences , the Soviet authorities reluctantly admitted that an accident had occurred.
The Chernobyl station was located in the Pripyat settlement, about 65 miles north of kyiv in the Ukraine. Built at the end of the 1608 on the banks of the Pripyat River, Chernobyl had four reactors, each capable of producing 1.000 megawatts of electrical energy.
At night of the 25 April 1986, a group of engineers began an electrical engineering experiment at the Number 4 reactor. The engineers, who had little knowledge of reactor physics, wanted to see if the reactor turbine could drive emergency water pumps with inertial energy.
As part of their poorly designed experiment, the engineers took the systems offline emergency safety of the reactor and its energy regulation system. They then compounded this recklessness with a series of mistakes: running the reactor at such a low power level that the reaction became unstable, and then removing too many control rods from the reactor in an attempt to restart it.
Reactor production increased to more than 200 megawatts, but it became increasingly difficult to check. However, at 1: 23 am del 15 April, the engineers continued their experiment and shut down the turbine generator to see if its inertial spin would feed the reactor water pumps. In fact, it did not properly feed the water pumps and, without cooling water, the power level in the reactor increased.
To prevent the merger, the operators reinserted all the 200 control rods in the reactor at one time. The control rods were meant to reduce backlash, but they had a design flaw: graphite tips. So, before the five meters of absorbent material from the control rod could penetrate into the core, 150 graphite tips they entered simultaneously, facilitating the reaction and causing an explosion that blew off the heavy steel-and-concrete lid of the reactor.
It was not a nuclear explosion, since nuclear power plants are incapable of to produce such a reaction, but rather it was chemical, caused by the ignition of the gases and steam that were generated by the uncontrolled reaction. In the explosion and subsequent fire, more than 33 tons of radioactive material, where it was transported by air currents.
The 27 April, the Soviet authorities began an evacuation of the 30.000 inhabitants of Pripyat . An attempt was made to cover it up, but the 15 of April the Swedish radiation monitoring stations, to more than 800 miles northwest of Chernobyl reported radiation levels 31 percent higher than normal. Later that day, the Soviet news agency acknowledged that a major nuclear accident had occurred at Chernobyl.
In the first days of the crisis, 32 people died in Chernobyl and dozens more suffered radiation burns.
The radiation that escaped into the atmosphere, several times greater than that produced by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was spread by the wind over the north and Eastern Europe, contaminating millions of acres of forest and farmland.
It is estimated that 5.000 Soviet citizens eventually died of cancer and other radiation-induced diseases caused by their exposure to radiation from Chernobyl, and the health of millions more was negatively affected.
In 2000, the last reactors in operation at Chernobyl were shut down and the plant was closed officially.
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