Chernobyl disaster

April 26 1986, 1:23 AM. The history recorded the worst nuclear power plant accident
known to mankind.

The accident happened at Chernobyl a power plant at that time in Soviet Union
today in Ukraine.

And at that time, I was living about 650 miles away from Chernobyl, in Romania.

On April 26th 1986 the world came to know the name Chernobyl. And today I want
to reconstruct all the events the lead to the disaster.

To be able to do that, I need to start with nuclear physics introduction.

More precisely with fission 101.

The nuclear plant is using nuclear fission to produce energy. The principle is easy.
Uranium is a radioactive element. If it shot with a bullet, a neutron, that neutron
will split the uranium in 2 smaller elements releasing 3 additional bullets, 3
additional neutrons that can split 3 more uranium atoms and this is how we start a
chain reaction. There are 20 know elements that it can split into, and one of them
that plays role in our story is Xenon. This split of uranium into smaller elements is
called fission and fission releases a lot of energy. The energy in one pound of
uranium equals 16,000 tons of coal.

Now with fission 101 in our hands let's see Chernobyl Reactor configuration.

In a reactor we have fuel.

The orange pieces is the fuel. The gray is the graphite which is a catalyst - it
increases the probability of a chain reaction.

On the upper part we have the control rods behaves like a bullet proof vest. They
absorb the bullets, the neutrons, reducing the probability of chain reaction.

I want to point a design flow of this control rods. The tip of these control rods was
made out of graphite which is a catalyst of the chain reaction, and not an
absorbent. In other words if we pull out completely the control rods, when we push
the back we increase the chain reaction before we are able to slow it down. We will
see shortly that this played a crucial role in the disaster.

How do we produce electricity?

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The reactor uses water to cool down the core. We push in water, now due to fission
the water is boiled to steam level, we collect the steam and we push the steam to
steam turbines that transforms the steam into electricity. The architecture of a
nuclear reactor is quite simple.

With fission 101 and reactor design understood we can examine what happen that
night.

The reactor was plan to be shut down for maintenance. But before doing that, the
team wanted to do an experiment. Basically if we cut completely the electricity to
the water pumps, what will happen? Those water pumps have diesel generators as
backup, but those diesel generators need 40 seconds to turn on. The experiment
was supposed to see if the inertial movement of the turbines is sufficient to keep
the reactor cool , till the generators are turned on.

At 11:04 the shutdown of the reactor began by pushing in the control rods, the
brake pedals.

By 12:05 the reactor reached 700 Mega Watt, the power needed to start the
experiment. However the power decreased even more without manual intervention.
And this was due to Xenon poisoning which was unknown to the control room crew.
Xenon poisoning is happening when a reactor is rashly shutdown. What happens is
that at lower power the probability of Uranium splitting into Xenon is much higher.
The phenomenon is called Xenon poisoning because Xenon behaves like bullet
proof vest like our control rods absorbing the neutrons, and stopping the chain
reaction. So, due to Xenon poisoning without further manual intervention the chain
reaction was decreased even more and the power reached 30 MW.

To increase the power the crew decided to pull out the control rods. So basically by
this moment we don't have any control of the reactor.

On top of that, the reactor had another design flaw: at low power the water is
pumped at lower speed, making the reactor highly unstable due to increased
steam production in the absence of the cold water - another thing that the control
room crew didn't know.

Eventually the team succeeds to increase the power to 200MW way below the 700
MW limit required by the test. Despite this, the crew decided to continue the
experiment.

At 1:23:04 AM the power to the turbines is shut down and the diesel generators will
take on by 1:23:43. Anyway during this time, only the inertial movement of the
turbines was cooling down the reactor. The reactor reached a high pressure and
high temperature very quick.

At 1:23:40 an emergency shutdown was recorded in the black box system.

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 The emergency shutdown pushed all the control rods into the reactor at once to
slow down the chain reaction and shut down the reactor. However the tip of those
control rods was made out of graphite which accelerates the reaction instead of
decelerating it. So when they entered the core we had a spike in the power output
from 200 MW to 500MW in 2-3 seconds. This spike consumes all the Xenon and that
expose the chain reaction that was happening in the reactor. Under the extremely
high temperature and steam pressure, the uranium rods fracture and the pieces will
block the control rods to further descend. The control rods were able to get in only
one 3rd before they got stuck. In 7 seconds the power reaches 30 GW, which was
10 times the normal power output. And the magnitude imagine you are driving a car
on a highway. The normal speed is around 60 miles per hour but if you really want
to push it, you can easily reach 100 miles per hour. No imagine that in a matter of 7
seconds you reach 1000 miles per hour, which no car can do today unless is called
an airplane. And this is what happen in that reactor. The power increased 10 times
the normal output. And in few seconds a huge explosion happened. The high
pressure steam pushed over the 2000 tones ceiling exposing the core. I want you to
notice that the explosion was a steam explosion and not a nuclear explosion like in
an atomic bomb. The contact with air with oxygen coupled with the high
temperature made the graphite ignite. The graphite which is basically coal burned
for almost 2 weeks releasing in atmosphere tones of radioactive dust.

This is the map few days after the accident and it shows the whole Europe being
affected and this one is 9 days after the tragic accident showing Asia, North
America and Africa being affected.

As you may imagine, absolutely everybody was affected by this disaster way or the
other and the effects will wash off by 2016, 30 years after the accident. However
the Chernobyl area will remain highly radioactive for many years or even centuries
to come.

In conclusion I want to end this presentation summarizing the 3 main causes of this
accident :

• Lack of knowledge and improper training of the personnel. Nobody in the

control room was a nuclear physicist.

• Human error. This was maybe the main cause of this accident. However until
then, the crew and the people in general had a huge trust and believe that a
nuclear reactor is completely safe and nothing can break it. This is not the
case anymore as Chernobyl opened everybody's eyes.

• Flawed reactor design - the reactor itself had design flaws unknown to the
crew. There are only very few of this type functioning today and only in
Russia with the expectation that by the end of this decade all of them will be
shut down.

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So fellow toastmasters and honored guests I wanted today to give a glimpse into
what happen in that control room on the tragic night of April 26th 1986, the date,
the world recorded the worst nuclear plant disaster in the history of human kind.
Now, this being a technical presentation I am looking forward to your feedback, if
this talk cleared the misconceptions and explain to you what happen that night. Mr.
Toastmaster.