The first two were engineers who knew the location of the valve, while the third was a shift supervisor at the reactor. Those men were Alexei Ananenko, Valeri Bezpalov, and Boris Baranov. Rather than draw straws or evacuate to save themselves, three men volunteered for this duty, knowing that it might be a suicide mission. The only way to drain the water was to open the valves, and the only way to reach the valves was to enter the flooded basement corridor. However, in a cruel twist, the drainage valves were located in a flooded corridor in the basement, and the entire area (including the water itself) was contaminated with potentially-deadly levels of radiation. This in turn would have destroyed the remains of the reactor, scattered radioactive material, and potentially led to meltdowns in the other three active nuclear reactors at the Chernobyl plant.Īuthor and Chernobyl disaster expert Andrew Leatherbarrow wrote, “If it would have triggered a second steam explosion that would have done unimaginable damage and destroyed the entire power station, including the three other reactors.”Įngineers at reactor number four knew that this radioactive steam explosion would surely occur unless the water was removed. In reality, the corium was so hot that it would have instantly flashed the cold water into steam, causing a powerful underground explosion. To the uninformed, this may not seem like a problem-after all, you might think the water would cool off the molten corium sludge.
The overheating reactor also overheated the water-cooling system, leading to a powerful steam explosion which severely damaged the reactor and started a chain reaction we commonly refer to as a meltdown.Ĭorium lava flows formed in this steam relief valve beneath the damaged reactor core. This was compounded by the fact that Soviet authorities refused to allow reactor power to be reduced to 30% as per protocol, as it would result in mass power outages. By 1:23 AM on April 26th, an emergency shutdown procedure was initiated, but a massive power spike caused the core to reach 120 times its maximum output. In other words, corners were cut in order to expedite the test, and this led to the situation spiraling out of control.
#NUCLEAR REACTOR MELTDOWN PROXMITY GENERATOR#
A subsequent report by the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group (INSAG) stated the following: “During preparation and testing of the turbine generator under run-down conditions using the auxiliary load, personnel disconnected a series of technical protection systems and breached the most important operational safety provisions for conducting a technical exercise.” Needless to say, something went very wrong. A diagram of reactor 4 shows the immense complexity of its design.
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