Page 37 - Curriculum Visions Dynamic Book

 The crippled reactor at Chernobyl.
Chernobyl
The word Chernobyl is familiar to almost everyone worldwide. This notoriety began on April 26, 1986, when one of the reactors at the Chernobyl site in the Ukraine exploded.
The explosion was the result of poor workmanship during construction, poorly designed safety systems and a series of disastrous decisions by the people operating the plant. In fact the reactor was being used for experiments and its emergency cooling system had been shut down. The experiment went wrong and the reactor began to heat up out of control. There
was no cooling system to deal with the problem, and eventually an explosion occurred that blew the lid
off the reactor. (It is important to note that, at the time, Soviet designs did not include the ball-shaped containment vessel used today to contain the results of any explosion. This made the Soviet design far cheaper but also far more dangerous.)
The reactor fuel started to melt its way down through the floor of the reactor. At the same time, not only was highly radioactive material thrown out of the top of the reactor, but far worse, there was a huge escape of radioactive gas and small particles (called contaminants). These went into the atmosphere where they were carried for thousands of kilometres by air currents.
As the contaminants were washed from the sky
by rain, they settled out on the plants of the land over much of northern Europe, contaminating the plants and making them unfit for eating. Animals grazing the grass in the contaminated area then produced contaminated milk, and their meat became unfit
for consumption.
After some days, and through a number of daring and dangerous manoeuvres, the reactor was encased in concrete and its radioactivity contained.
The disaster killed 31 people outright, but the real death toll, including those who died or will die as a result of being exposed to radiation – perhaps within a 100 km radius of the plant – will run into the thousands.
The Chernobyl disaster has made people worry about nuclear power worldwide, even though nuclear power stations in most countries are built to much higher standards, and such accidents probably would not happen to them.
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