Ironically, the origin of the Chernobyl catastrophe was an experiment to
determine if, in the event that power was lost, the inertia in the turbines
would be enough to start up the reactor emergency cooling pumps. That they
had to disable the automatic emergency core cooling system to perform the
experiment was only the first significantly poor decision. Another was to
run the reactor at extremely low power, in which condition scramming (had it
succeeded) would have increased the output!
Many other poor-with-hindsight decisions had already been taken at the
design stage - but if you want ready access to the plutonium produced in the
core, you can't have a containment vessel, can you. Secondary containment?
You're having a laugh, comrade.
Piers
-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Fildes [mailto:afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: 15 March 2011 05:56
To: Olympus Camera Discussion
Subject: Re: [OM] E-5 and engineers...
Indeed but more information is coming through (see Ian's post) and the
picture becomes clearer. Apparently the initial earthquake destroyed the
basic 'off-site' power input that runs the cooling system. The reactor was
scrammed automatically (control rods drop in) but there's still around 7% of
peak heat being produced by the reactor cores.
--snip
--
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