Naked Science Forum
General Science => General Science => Topic started by: tony6789 on 14/05/2007 16:39:23
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what is this all about really?
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It's about the Russians slacking and causing a disaster their still trying to fix. A nuclear explosion. China Syndrome.
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It's about the Russians slacking and causing a disaster their still trying to fix. A nuclear explosion. China Syndrome.
Wish it was that simple.
The Russians (more accurately, the Soviets) created the problem; but since then the Soviet Union has split up, and the Ukrainians are having to continue to fix the problem, because Chernobyl is in their territory (and, ofcourse, right now the Russians and Ukrainians are not on very good terms).
Chernobyl was the location of a major Soviet era nuclear power station. The power station has various design limitations with regard to safety; and the operations people decided to perform some tests on the nuclear reactors; things went wrong, and the reactors caught fire, blasting nuclear debris across Europe.
Their is still too much radioactive debris close to the reactor to be safe to humans to live; although some humans do continue to live closer than they should, and cancer rates are higher than ought to be (but, home is home - and they will not let the Government move them).
Wild life still lives in the area, and seem to have proved remarkably resilient to the dangers, and actually thrive because humans have been too scared to move back into the area.
Some of the remaining reactors are still being used by the Ukraine, simply because they are too poor to replace them with anything else (and the fact that the Russians have massively hiked up the price of gas and oil to the Ukraine, only makes them even more dependent on the nuclear reactors).
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A nuclear explosion. China Syndrome
Nope. The RBMK reactors have an intrinsic low-power instability giving rise to a positive void coefficient of reactivity; or to put it another way under some conditions boiling in the core can lead to a rapid rise in power with more boiling in a positive feedback loop. Chernobyl was caused by rapid in-core steam production and (probably) the high power level giving fuel failure and hydrogen production. The steam blew the 2000 tonne lid of the reactor, the air went in and the fuel/graphite/hydrogen started to burn. There was no nuclear explosion. But with no containment building the radioactive fission products escaped to the environment. No-one in the West would give a reactor like this an operating licence.
China syndrome it wasn't. This is a name more usually applied to a molten or melting reactor. The idea (a-bit-tongue-in-cheek) was that the molten core might burn its way through the crust and end up in China. In reality the accident at Three Mile Island showed that it is possible to melt a large fraction (around a third) of the core without seeing reactor pressure vessel failure. Work since TMI suggests that even if vessel failure had occurred, the molten 'corium' wouldn't have penetrated the reactor building structural concrete. Good film though.... can't beat Jack Lemon.
Some of the remaining reactors are still being used by the Ukraine,
Not just by Ukraine - for example the RBMK's are still running at Ignalina, providing around 80% of Lithuania's electricty. You shut them down, they freeze.
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ok....kinda confusing but yea