One of the worst accidents in history took place on April 26 1986.
The nuclear reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine.
To give you some background, this is how a nuclear power plant works.
A reactor emits the radiation. The radiation heats the water, the steam then turns the turbine and it's generator produces electricity.
The nuclear reactor itself is generally just a big kettle filled with water with
the rods mounted in it.
One of the types of rods is the fuel rod, which contains fissile elements that heat up enormously.
Another tab is the control rod, which slows down the nuclear reaction.
The control rod can be moved up and down in the reactor core. This is how the
temperature is controlled.
The Chernobyl engineers plan the test.
They wanted to figure out what would happen to the turbine, if the reactor was shut down
very slowly.
So on that fateful day they literally dropped the temperature of the reactor until it fell to the lowest level and then the reactor almost came
to a halt.
To save the test, control rods were moved out of the reactor core then, the fission started again and the reactor was operational within a couple of minutes.
Then the experiment began, pumps that were circulating water through the reactor were
disconnected from the grid and connected to the generator of the turbine, that
was revolving from force of inertia.
Сould the generator of the turbine produce enough electricity for the pumps? The answer was no, the core started to heat up. The staff had to abort the test by activating directors emergency shutdown system all the control rods were then injected into the reactor core at once and the nuclear fusion had to stop right there but the tip of the control rod was made
of a material that produced a short burst of radiation before slowing it down.
So this is what happened, control rods started the motion into the reactor core and in a split-second the temperature heated reactor at an unimaginable level was led to the core of the reactor was completely destroyed and the nuclear fuel was released into the environment.
Radioactive cloud drifted all across the globe thousands of square kilometers.
All sites around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant were contaminated to such an extent that
they were pretty much forever lost to
humanity. It is believed that health issues related to the accident claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Recovery from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster continues to this day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JH0AxQ3eC3Q
