? You really need to see the whole series and how one arrogant man + a poorly designed RBMK reactor nearly wiped out the whole continent with a blast that would have equaled several megatons and have melted into the earth contaminating the water supply, poisoning a major portion of the planet. Workers had to volunteer to die a horrible death to help stop further catastrophe. It scared the hell out of me. 15,000 Röntgens was disseminating from the exposed core and graphite fragments from fuel channels. That's 2 Hiroshima bombs worth every hour for months. The death toll, including early cancers was estimated to be from 10's to hundreds of thousands, the Soviets report it at 31 to this day.
This is a must see. ?
A little info on the RBMK graphite tipped control rod reactors, in other words a bargain brand reactor.
RBMK Reactors – Appendix to Nuclear Power Reactors
(Updated June 2019)
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- The RBMK is an unusual reactor design, one of two to emerge in the Soviet Union in the 1970s.
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- The design had several shortcomings, and was the design involved in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
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- Major modifications have been made to RBMK reactors still operating.
The Soviet-designed RBMK (
reaktor bolshoy moshchnosty kanalny, high-power channel reactor) is a water-cooled reactor with individual fuel channels and using graphite as its moderator. It is also known as the light water graphite reactor (LWGR). As with a boiling water reactor (BWR), water boils in the fuel channels (at about 6.9 MPa) and steam is separated above them in a single circuit. It is very different from most other power reactor designs as it derived from a design principally for plutonium production and was intended and used in Russia for both plutonium and power production.
The combination of graphite moderator and water coolant is found in no other power reactors in the world. As the
Chernobyl accident showed, several of the RBMK's design characteristics – in particular, the control rod design and a positive void coefficient – were unsafe. A number of significant design changes were made after the Chernobyl accident to address these problems.
RBMK's still in operation:
