Chernobyl :: Ukraine Disaster History Essays

Chernobyl 1986 was a year of several meaningful human beingwide events, some of which include the Voyager 2 got details and pictures of Uranus, the space shuttle Challenger exploded on take shoot, and Haleys comet soared past Earth (infoplease.com). Perhaps the event that alarmed the world the most, however, was the major nuclear accident that occurred at the nuclear power plant Chernobyl. The nuclear disaster that occurred at Chernobyl in 1986 (Lecture 4/1/02), has evermore changed the way that nuclear power plants are viewed by the world. Chernobyl is now an fling city in north Ukraine because at 123 am on April 26th (Chernobyl.com), during an unauthorized test of one of the plants four nuclear reactors, engineers initiated an torrential chain reaction in the core of the reactor after change emergency backup systems (infoplease.com). The type of reactor used at Chernobyl was a graphite-water reactor (Lecture 3/25/02). This means that the moderator o f the reactor is graphite, and the coolant is water (Lecture 3/25/02). According to Chernobyl.com, technicians allowed the power level in the fourth reactor to fall to an extremely low level, causing a core meltdown. An ebullition ripped the top off the containment building, expelling radioactive stuff and nonsense into the atmosphere for all over ten days (Chernobyl.com). More was then released in a onset that followed, due to a second detonation that allowed air to rush into the reactor (world-nuclear.org). It was only after Swedish instruments detected a problem from the explosion that Soviet authorities admitted that an accident had occurred (infoplease.com). The reactor core was sealed off by air-dropping a cement mixture which included 5,000 tons of boron, dolomite, sand, form and lead, but not before eight tons of radioactive material had escaped into the atmosphere (infoplease.com). It is estimated that all of the xenon gas, about half of the t incture of iodine and caesium, and at least 5% of the remaining radioactive material in the Chernobyl reactor core was released in the accident (world-nuclear.org). Over twenty firefighters died without delay from overexposure to radioactivity, while hundreds suffered from severe radiation sickness (infoplease.