Research Paper On Chernobyl

In a small town in the Ukraine people slept quietly during the night of April 25th to April 26th. The next day people of Pripyat awoke, and they went about their daily business as normal. Kids went to school, adults went to work, and it was a typical day (" 'Voices From Chernobyl ': Survivors ' Stories."). Little did they know of the disaster that struck at 1:23 a.m. at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Nadezhda Petrovna Vygovskaya, a survivor of the event recalls “I can still see the bright-crimson glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. This wasn 't any ordinary fire, it was some sort of shining.” During the night graphite reactor number 4 had exploded and was releasing seven tons of dangerous radiation into the surrounding area (Borrero). …show more content…
The entire disaster started when emergency generators were failing and they needed to do a test on the reactor to help fix the generator. However, in order to do this test they needed to turn off the safety systems. The reactor had been losing power up until they decided to do this test, which was the opposite of what should have been happening. When they did the test, the cooling pumps and turbines turned off, and the reactor had a huge increase in power. The people working with the reactor tried to manually stop it from failing but the fuel start break apart and the reactor exploded. The building caught on fire. This Catastrophe is known as the most disastrous nuclear failure in history (Borrero;"Issue No.12 Spring."). The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster affected people biologically, changed the environment, and created political and social