In to watch later

Gave me chills brah, srsJory from GoT played the Engineer who was forced to look over the railing into the open reactor. Another wild thing was how close the actors were to most of the real people.

So freaking true, when they showed the real people at the court trial, it was a crazy good resemblance.

meanwhile mind=blown this morning to learn that apparently instagram influencers are flocking to the site...

Radioactive sloots gon sloot








That is pathetic.

There are places where it's "safe" but i would also take my own equipment to make sure. The show did embellish a little in the end of the firefighters equipment containing....deadly?...levels of radiation to this day.Nuclear weapons and Reactors are two very different fires to play with. Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear explosion in the sense of a nuclear bomb. It was steam explosion where material was ejected out of the core, from a reactor not actually inside of a containment building.

On episode 4 brahs. Pretty good show as I've always had a fascination with nuclear incidents/warfare. Partly because it's both horrifying and real.

Few inconsistencies though like the notion of washed/unclothed ARS victims being contagious.

Also the fabricated character of Ulana Khomyuk. Kinda silly how some nuclear physicist miles away puts a wet finger in the air, knows exactly what's going on, goes to Chernobyl or Moscow, and tells people how to do their job. Honestly they should have just kept true to history on that part.

Repped for explanation of Ulana Khomyuk

Nuclear energy is actually dope

Mind = obliterated ...first show I can give 10/10 without even a second of hesitation.

#NotGreatNotTerrible.

3.6 Roentgens Would Not Bang RadioActive Pancakes.

"the reactor and is turbines were meant to undergo a test to find out whether the spinning steam turbines and generators could produce enough electricity while coasting to a stop to run the reactor cooling pumps while the diesel generators were brought online. This test, far from routine, was derived because, if, for example, the West attacked electrical grids and the plant was disconnected, the reactors would need to be E-stopped, like RIGHT now! Decay heat would still need to be dealt with. This test was supposed to have been done during unit 4s commissioning in, like, '83 or '84. The paperwork was pencil-whipped (extremely kommon in the USSR bekause ahead-of-time konstruction delivery resulted in bonus of many roubles.) Turns out, the communists were preeetty corner-cutty.

The reactor design itself is loaded with flaws. Let's put it this way... The USSR used a cheaper-to-build reactor design than LITERALLY THE WHOLE REST OF THE WORLD! It lacked a heavy steel and concrete containment building, it used the steam directly produced by the uranium fuel to run the turbines (water turned to steam IN the reactor core and there was no heat exchanger separating irradiated steam and water from, ****in... NOT radioactive water), it used hollow graphite blocks as a moderator to maintaining the nuclear chain reaction (US and West European reactors use pressurized water, so no water, no nuclear reaction), the boron control rods were graphite tipped (which briefly increased reactor output upon insertion, this is important for later) and about 57 other glaring flaws... like safety systems THAT COULD BE OVERRIDDEN!

The test was scheduled for April 25th. It didn't happen on the day shift; because Kievs electrical grid controller asked for it to be done later in the evening, after peak demand. It didn't happen on the evening shift, either, for unclear reasons. So when the night shift started at midnight of the 26th, the dude from Moscow who had been there all day and was to oversee the test was... well, testy. The night shift guys were the youngest and least experienced (the reactor operator was 26 years old) and they'd just been handed a procedure binder loaded with annotations and crossed out procedures.

Note* Xenon poisoning occurs when reducing capacity in nuclear reactors. Xenon is a fission byproduct that actually absorbs the zooming around neutrons, preventing them from slamming into another Uranium 235 atom, splitting it, and setting even more neutrons free to go slam into other atoms. During stable operation, Xenon is "burned off" at a rate that allows the chain reaction to continue. If control rods are inserted and the reaction slowed, there's an excess of Xenon and it has a control rod like effect, further reducing output. The nuclear chain reaction will nearly stop because of the excess neutron absorbing **** in the reactor over-coming the nuclear chain reaction itself. The reactor should need to sit for 48 hours before attempts by to restart the reaction, giving the Xenon a chance to naturally decay.

So, with that fully explained, let's continue!

The reactor had a thermal output rating of 1500 megawatts (1.5 gigawatts). The test was to be conducted at 1500, but must not to go below 700MW or reactor instability could occur. The reactor had been running at full capacity, but the decision was made to slightly reduce capacity before starting.

1. To begin, manual control was taken and the control rods were partially inserted into the core, reducing reactor output.

2. The operator switched the control rods back to automatic control, thinking the computer would hold the desired output.

3. The automatic system saw the sudden output reduction as a power failure and began plunging the control rods to their fully inserted position, nearly shutting the reactor down.

4. The Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) tried to start. It was manually overridden and turned off.

5. Reactor output dropped to between 0 and 30 MW (depending on which report is read.)

6. The previously inserted rods were retracted.

7. Reactor output didn't increase.

8. Serious Xenon poisoning had occurred, further slowing the nuclear reaction.

9. The operator was ordered to bring the reactor back up to power, he REFUSED! It went against written procedure. (Poor guy, tried to do his job right, and was blamed for the whole thing)

10. Cranky Moscow dude yelled and made the 27 year old shift chief bring reactor back up: he did. (Being so young, and being a nuclear plant operator or chief was pretty much a dream job in Soviet Ukraine. To argue with a senior official could cost you everything)

11. About half the control rods were now fully retracted, but reactor output was only up to 200MW... too low to test.

12. The coolant pumps were sped up, and additional pumps brought online to try to counteract the Xenon poisoning, this increased water volume, decreased steam volume, and slowed the turbines as a result.

13. Additional control rods were retracted to try to bring steam output up to speed the turbine back up.

14. The equivalent of only 8 fully inserted rods remained in the core. 15 was the minimum. The reactor had over 211 control rods...

15. Hot spots began developing in the core, but instrumentation wasn't present in the interior of the core. The operator noticed the computer was demanding the reactor be shut down. Every safety system had been bypassed. Power output was still too low, Moscow dude insisted they continue.

16. Output finally increased enough and the turbine was disconnected and began its coast down test.

17. Once the turbine was disconnected, the condenser couldn't keep up and raw steam entered the condensate (steam turned back into water) return pipes and caused cavitation in the pumps. The steam in the pumps intermittently stopped pumping water into the core. As pockets of steam collapsed inside the pipes, loud banging sounds could be heard in the turbine hall and near the reactor.

18. The already unstable core began violently producing pockets of steam. Output began surging.

19. 4 of the 8 pumps were still running on the decelerating turbine and began slowing. Even less water was available for core cooling.

20. The core temperature and pressure gauges were pegged. The steam condenser should have kept up and cooled the steam back to water, but it was overworked - pockets of steam continued entering the pumps. The reactor was idiotically kept online to repeat the turbine test if necessary.

21. The core suddenly surged way past its maximum output.

22. Between the noise and power surges, operators decided to "SCRAM" the reactor - SCRAM means, Safety Control Rod Axe Man. It was to plunge ALL control rods to their fully inserted position and stop the reactor.

23. The graphite tipped control rods began descending. Soviet nukes used control servo motors that were notoriously slow, taking 18 seconds to fully insert the rods.

24. The graphite (graphite increased nuclear reaction) tipped rods acted like Vin Diesel hitting the "NOS button" in that first Fast and the Furious movie/turd. The reactor went bonkers.

25. The sudden increase in output fractured the core and the rods became stuck only partially inserted. There was now nothing to slow the reaction.

26. Reactor output soared well beyond what instrumentation could even remotely measure.

27. Pressure built so high it blew the 450 TON lid clean the **** OFF THE REACTOR.

28. Air and steam rushed into the core, reacted with the zirconium jacket around each uranium fuel rod, created a ton of hydrogen, then blew the whole roof off the building in a second explosion, spewing tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere.

It took awhile for what had happened to sink in. They though the explosion was from a separator drum. They continued trying to operate and cool the core, pumping tons and tons of water into it, all of which blew into the night sky as radioactive steam.

The soviet government blamed the **** out of the operators. There was no way they could, or would, admit that ALL their mighty RBMK-1000 reactors were gravely flawed. They couldn't afford to shut their entire nuclear fleet down because of ****ty design! They lied. They knew the reactors were seriously flawed, but they built them anyway. They just decided to build controls to deal with the shortcomings... Then made them by-passable."

cliffs?

1-28.

I read somewhere that the hospital scene was watered down vs the real thing. "And then—the last thing. I remember it in flashes, all broken up. I was sitting on my little chair next to him at night. At eight I said: “Vasenka, I’m going to go for a little walk.” He opened his eyes and closed them, letting me go. I had just walked to the hotel, gone up to my room, lain down on the floor—I couldn’t lie on the bed; everything hurt too much—when the cleaning lady started knocking on the door. “Go! Run to him! He’s calling for you like mad!”

Right away I called the nurse’s post. “How is he?” “He died fifteen minutes ago.” What? I was there all night. I was gone for three hours! I ran down the stairs. He was still in his biochamber, they hadn’t taken him away yet. I didn’t leave him anymore after that. I escorted him all the way to the cemetery. Although the thing I remember isn’t the grave, it’s the plastic bag. That bag.

At the morgue they said, “Want to see what we’ll dress him in?” I did! They dressed him up in formal wear, with his service cap. They couldn’t get shoes on him because his feet had swelled up. They had to cut up the formal wear, too, because they couldn’t get it on him, there wasn’t a whole body to put it on. The last two days in the hospital—pieces of his lungs, of his liver, were coming out of his mouth. He was choking on his internal organs. I’d wrap my hand in a bandage and put it in his mouth, take out all that stuff. It’s impossible to talk about. It’s impossible to write about. And even to live through. They couldn’t get a single pair of shoes to fit him. They buried him barefoot."

The guy that you saw holding the door open while the two others went in to look at the core survived. "in an interview, Alexander said "The wall and door basically saved my life." Unlike the three other engineers, who went inside and died shortly after. After that, he got sick a few hours later and vomited constantly, then was brought to the hospital, where he stayed for weeks. In the end, however, he was one of the very lucky few who ended up surviving the ordeal."

The last episode where the guy explains what happened in the court room. He had that bulletin board and had it divided into sections. That scene was 100% accurate with what happened and was a brilliant explanation. The US uses a negative temperature coefficient of reactivity which is why that exact type of accident wouldn't happen here. Like the movie said, their's was a positive coefficient. I was very impressed with the way the movie explained the accident.

LOL @ that woman character a make believe character just to add a woman in it.

Still a good show though. Too many penors in the 4th episode. HNNNGGGG(Nh)

BumpIt's on Prime and I just finished it again a week or so ago... Ran across this interview with Dyatlov too.