Chernobyl

It is unbelievable how many people can be killed by a small decision made by a government. In two articles, Chernobyl: before, during, and after by Cindy Rush, and Chernobyl Remains a Dead Zone by Lawrence Gable focuses on what happened in Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear power plant blew up. Leaving the surrounding area in ashes and spreading nuclear radiation across Europe, causing several deaths and chronic diseases. With the government’s ignorance, deaths of the people who risked their lives trying to help settle the explosion and fire , and the people who survived but were infected with thyroid cancer, Chernobyl was a terrible calamity. But what makes it worse is that it all could have all been avoided if the Soviet government paid more attention to safety and the people. Excluding the deaths, Chernobyl is a lesson to the world to not make the same mistake…

power plant, Chernobyl was undergoing safety testing when one of the reactors was compromised releasing radioactive particles into the atmosphere. The disaster at Chernobyl has since raised many concerns such as what caused the release…

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…

scientists working at a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, a city located in the Ukraine on the border it shared with Belarus and Russia (the Soviet Union at the time), were preparing for a test. This test was meant to see how long turbines would last to supply power to the main pumps if there were ever a major loss of electricity. This exact experiment had been done a year prior to the incident, but the power from the turbine ran out too quickly, so new designs for the voltage regulators were…

The Location of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant During the early morning of April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear disaster occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant is located in the Ukraine, and is about 20 km south of the border of Belarus. Surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant are the cities of Pripyat and Chornobyl. Pripyat is about 3 km away and had a population of about 49,000, while Chornobyl is 15 km southeast of the complex with a…

The Chernobyl Catastrophe and its Impact on the Environment Imagine New York City, a city bustling with life; busy streets, people flooding the sidewalks, flashing lights, and never ending noise. Now imagine a post-apocalyptic city; deserted streets, empty buildings, shattered windows, doors hanging from their hinges, weeds and overgrowth climbing up walls, and unsettling silence. This is how one may describe Pripyat, Ukraine. What was once a city filled with great activity and energy is now a…

The city of Chernobyl is located in northern Kiev Oblast, in modern day Ukraine, where it was previously under the Soviet Union control. In the city is a nuclear power plant built and designed by the Soviets. It was an RBMK-1000 model nuclear reactor, which used “enriched U-235 uranium fuel to heat water creating steam that drives the reactors’ turbines and generate electricity” (http://www.livescience.com/39961-chernobyl.html). The plant had 4 reactors with graphite moderators, which slows down…

early that morning. Since Chernobyl was a nuclear plant, radioactive materials were dispersed into the air. Some of the products are very lethal, some are not, but they still affect the world even today. The Chernobyl Disaster caused problems and continues to cause problems in humans, animals, and the environment. The day of the explosion began a clear and peaceful day. The explosion occurred during a voltage regulation test. The reactor was required to run on…

Conducting experiments at a low power was claimed to be a “violation of the plant’s technical specification” (“Fact Sheets”). This then had caused an explosion within the reactor’s core resulting in the eruption of heat and disintegrated radioactive fuel into the atmosphere (“Chernobyl: Basic Facts”). Soviet authorities had a timeline of 36 hours post-accident to evacuate the citizen of the surrounding area of the power plant. The radiation that was included with the accident may have been…

Chernobyl On April 26, 1986 in a town just north of Kiev, Ukraine, lies the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and on this unfortunate day one of the nuclear reactors failed, causing numerous deaths and many more problems to the areas surrounding this nuclear plant. In this paper the history of Chernobyl will be examined and how it happened, along with the health effects related to radiation exposure, environmental effects, and what its’s like at Chernobyl today. Chernobyl had a total of four…