39 years ago- Saturday 26 April 1986: The Chernobyl nuclear disaster
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“The price of the Chernobyl catastrophe was overwhelming, not only in human terms, but also economically. Even today, the legacy of Chernobyl affects the economies of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.” - Mikhail Gorbachev

He wrote: “Chernobyl opened my eyes like nothing else: it showed the horrible consequences of nuclear power even when it is used for non-military purposes.” -- Mikhail Gorbachev

"On 26 April 39 years ago, the worst nuclear accident so far exploded in Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. It was a Soviet-made RMBK, high-power channel reactor design that could produce plutonium for nuclear bombs as easily as it could produce electricity.

A major reason for the disaster was that those in Moscow who decided to re-purpose reactors originally designed to produce materials for nuclear weapons to produce electricity kept secret a good deal about the inherent design dangers and instability of the reactors even from the reactor operators (including its “positive void co-efficient of reactivity”). The operators with pressure to fill production quotas cut corners.

In the reactor, 1,661 zirconium pressure tubes contained fuel rods and cooling water within 1,700 tonnes of graphite and a complex system of control rods, without heavy engineered containment. The design was 20 years old, but the plant had only been operating for three years.

An experiment was conducted to determine how much electricity could be generated by the freewheeling turbine to which supply of steam from the reactor had been cut. The experiment was delayed by 12 hours but continued in the wee morning hours despite failure to reset the automatic control system.

Multiple safety rules were deliberately violated. Reactor power was lowered to prohibited levels before attempts were made to insert shutdown control rods into the reactor core. Because of an inherent flaw in the reactor design, this did not lead to powering down, but to a rapid explosive burst. Nuclear criticality increased rapidly in some fuel elements, leading to their explosive disintegration, generation of vast quantities of steam and a hydrogen explosion. Chunks of highly radioactive molten fuel were blasted 7 – 9 km into the air, much of it into the stratosphere. A burning plume extended 500 m high. The two explosions and graphite fire over the next 10 days ejected about one third of the 190 tonnes of fuel inside the reactor and radioactive material continue to be emitted for a month.

The World Health Organisation observed that the Chernobyl disaster released 200 times as much total radioactivity as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.

Early fallout more than 1,500 km away was first detected the following day when unusually high levels of radiation were measured when a nuclear power plant worker in Sweden was checking out of work. For a day and a half, nobody understood the full extent of the disaster. Initial attempts to put the fire out with water only worsened the situation. Evacuation of nearby residents was only implemented after 34 hours.

Nuclear reactors may produce useful electricity for a brief few decades, but their enduring products are uniquely hazardous radiation and high-level radioactive waste which persist over geological time frames.

Thirty nine years is a little over one half-life of caesium 137, so the cesium-137 in fallout across the world will by now have decayed by a little over half. The plutonium 239 released, however, with a half-life of 24,400 years, will have only decayed by one seventh of 1% by now. It will take a quarter of a million years for it to substantially decay away.

The misguided arrogant and dangerous hubris and vested interests that brought us the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters, and at least 11 other core melt accidents in different nuclear reactors, now brings us the willful madness of the alternative parties of Australian government’s plan for nuclear reactors proliferated around our wide, sunny and windy land. If we don’t act on evidence and learn from the past, we will be doomed to repeat it."

Archived:
archive.ph/8t2Ka

RESOURCES:

Part 1 The Chernobyl Disaster Explained 1986 | A Brief History of Documentary
youtu.be/IkBJU8BbrUs

The RBMK reactor type had an extremely positive void coefficient, which means that without careful proper oversight, the reactor can rapidly become unsafe.
The economic and political significance of Russia's RBMK reactors
dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/1…

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