April 26, 1986
From time to time we will wander off into non-geological territory. Like today! Twenty two years ago technicians at the Chernobyl power plant in the Ukraine began some rather odd experiments. The result of these experiments was that in the early morning hours of April 26, 1986 one of the reactors at the Chernobyl plant failed catastrophically. Although the Chernobyl reactor design was an unusual one (and an unusually dangerous one) the accident led to increased resistance to nuclear power in the United States.
Although a complete discussion of the causes of the Chernobyl accident is beyond the scope of this blog, an examination of the Chernobyl accident is valuable for two reasons. 1)It has real-life lessons for us all. 2)We can learn something about nuclear reactor design and assess whether the problems that caused Chernobyl are likely to be repeated in other reactors. We’ll consider some of these issues over the next few days.
Posted: April 26th, 2008 under Chernobyl, Nuclear Power.