Has anyone ever been to Pripyat (the Chernobyl ghost town)?

[Michael88]

I saw a guy on TV how worked on the block 3 reactor who is still alive and talked about the accident. It was a testing sequence and the people overstressed the reactor because they tested it at over 200% power output.

The people working on the reactor knew that something bad was going to happen while they rised the power to over 200% but they didnt had enough guts to raise voice agianst the chief of the whole nuclear plant who was the head of the testing sequence so they simply blew up the reactor - and they knew that it was going to happen. The survivng man reported that immediately after the big bang he went out of the control room to look after the reactor; he was standing directly in front of the burning reactor for several minutes and rescued survivors. He reported that the smoke the burning reactor created started to ''bite'' in the throath and he felt like he had fever feeling a bad stinging all over the body. - but he survived and still lives without having cancer or leucemia. He is for sure the most radiation-pollutet living man on earth.

I think I saw it at the discovery channel.

 

[jammyozzy]

*snip*

Are you sure that's what happened? The version I know was that the reactor had to be shut down for maintenance, and the decision was made to test whether the turbine powering the reactor water pumps could continue to power the water pumps in the 40 seconds between the loss of the external power supply and the emergency diesel generators getting up to full speed. The basic process I know was that the reactor was powered down too quickly, the power output dropped too quickly, and so most of the control rods were removed from the core. The turbine was spun up to full speed and then disconnected, and the sudden loss of water, combined with the lack of control rods, caused the reactor's thermal output to spike massively, to something like 10x its normal output. The thing basically turned into a giant pressure cooker, and the steam pressure was enough to blow the top of the reactor off.

(Sorry, I'm kinda fascinated by the whole thing. I could go into way more detail, but that's the basics of what I thought happened. )

 

[Philly]

quote

This is the right story. There was also something about how they wanted to conduct the test at some specific time of the day but the need for power at peak time meant that they had to conduct it at a different time when they were less able to prepare for the test. Basically, it was a lot of not enough thinking on too many people's part.

 

[Slick6]

And didn't having the test at an irregular time, mean having the more inexperienced night crew on hand? That's what I have understood from various stories.

 

[Philly]

I think that they were going to do it in the evening and began to prepare to do the test then but at the last minute they needed the reactor back in action for the peak power time. Then the test was incorrectly carried out at night.

But somehow I'm not sure if this is right....

 

[Sting]

I think that they were going to do it in the evening and began to prepare to do the test then but at the last minute they needed the reactor back in action for the peak power time. Then the test was incorrectly carried out at night.

But somehow I'm not sure if this is right....

Thats the Wikipedia entry isnt it? About the nightteam being a skeleton crew and having little or no experience with nuclear reactors at all. Reads like one blunder after another. I keep going back to wikipedia to read and re-read to assimilate all the info.

It's also got me reading about nuclear reactor incidents on submarines.

 

[tait]

It's also got me reading about nuclear reactor incidents on submarines.

If you find any good stories of submarine accidents let us know, sounds really interesting.

 

[Flerbizky]

If you find any good stories of submarine accidents let us know, sounds really interesting.

I remember one, probably from Discovery, where a crew member told how there's was a purple glow coming from the reactor they were mending, from literally 2 feet away..

They courage to do such a thing a not just go cry in a corner defies beliefs...

Twas a Russian sub as well..

 

[Sting]

If you find any good stories of submarine accidents let us know, sounds really interesting.

I read through this list. The Thresher, Scorpion, Kursk and K19(inspired the film of same name) are quite well known accidents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Naval_nuclear_accidents

 

[DuckRacer]

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=7786

If you've played CoD4, you can relate to these.