Chernobyl+Q4

The Chernobyl accident: Question number 4 By Iman Oztas 8A

The accident, at the Chernobyl power plant is often deemed the as the worst chemical disaster in the century. Some say longer. It is now a wasteland, inhabited by animals and bacteria. Some of the animals that live at Chernobyl have come out of extinction and now live in the wasteland.

The day of the disaster, the 26th of April 1986 the town was quiet, peaceful, everybody was going about their daily business. The day was perfect, the night was a catastrophe.

Early in the morning around, 1:23:44 am (local time) Reactor number 4 suffered from a major power excursion, this happened in the midst of a test that was ordered to take place by the Moscow authorities. The test was not supposed to be conducted by the staff on the night shift. They were not told to not do it; nobody said anything to them about not conducting that test. It is said that the men on the night shift were not trained properly, had little experience and as some say just lazy. They attempted to conduct the test that the day shift was supposed to do. It was suposed to be shut down to see how little power the turbines would be able to work for during a blackout.

The test was not suposed to take that long or it was not to be hard, it would only be hard if you had no idea how conduct the test. Chernobyl needed to be shut down for this test to be conducted also. There was also a nearby power plant that had malfunctioned and the Chernobyl plant was working overtime to fill in. A few minutes later the power increased at least 100 times the normal value of radiation. The interior of the reactor plant had a 500 MW electric turbine that would allow enough electricity to be generated to keep the water cooling pumps during the 30 to 50 second delay that the emergency diesel generators needed to work, they would also carry aroun 192 tones of fuel.They would also be able o work for the other power plant that was not currently in use. Alaxander Akimov tried the AZ button (emergency shutdown) but that never worked and thing s got out of hand. The Alaxander Akimov never even consulted with Anatoli Dyatlov, the deputy chief of the plant and in charge of preparations and the setting the initial conditions for the test. The resulting steam explosion and the several fires released at least of the 5 % of the radioactive chemicals into the atmosphere and downwind. Yet all the staff at the Chernobyl power plant were unable to stop these events from occurring and hundreds of thousands of people’s lives being endangered and changed forever.

Bibliography:

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