It was built in the late 1970’s on the banks of the Pripyat river. Chernobyl had four reactors, each with the ability to produce 1,000 MW of electric power. On April 25, 1986, the engineers working there took it upon themselves to perform a stress test on reactor number four. The engineers, even though they had little experience with reactors, wanted to see if the reactor’s turbine could run the emergency water pumps with inertia alone (“Nuclear disaster”, 2016). The engineers disconnected the reactor’s emergency safety systems, as well as its power regulation system. The engineers then reduced the power to the point where the reaction in the core became highly unstable. When they noticed this, the engineers removed some of the control rods in the reactor, the parts that control the rate of fission of the uranium in the reactor. The instability increased rapidly until the engineers decided to reinsert all 200 graphite control rods at once, catalyzing the reaction (Lallanilla, 2013).
At 1:23 a.m. on April 26th, the reactor exploded. The explosion blew the lid off of the reactor, releasing more than 50 tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere. The 30,000 inhabitants of Pripyat were immediately evacuated, and moved to another city in