Hello I need this edited. It is a sientific paper I have most of it together but
ID: 3307750 • Letter: H
Question
Hello I need this edited. It is a sientific paper I have most of it together but I need it corrected.
They had the most state of the art Nuclear facility of their time but the Chernobyl Power Plant had a catastrophic meltdown(2). The Chernobyl Power Complex consisted of four nuclear reactors of the RBMK-1000 design. Units 1 and 2 were built between 1970 and 1977, while units 3 and 4 of the same design were completed in 1983 each RBMK-1000 reactor that produced a fission reaction of 3,200mega watts of thermal energy. (1) What was the main engineering failure behind reactor 4 in the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster in Soviet Union which is now part of the Ukraine? How was this epidemic handled by the Soviet Union and surrounding countries? Is this Nuclear Disaster still a threat to the Ukraine and neighboring countries today? If it is what are they doing to stop the nuclear radiation and prevent this from happening again? The scientific community deems this the worst environmental tragedy ever. This event is etched into history as a disastrous failure but many engineering solutions for nuclear reactors were brought to the light after this disaster.
The RBMK reactors tended to be highly unstable when the reactor was on low power settings. This could completely shut down the power within the reactor and require a lengthy restart time. When a collapse seemed threatening, operators did the most risky thing possible by removing more boron rods than Soviet regulations allowed. This would give the reactor a surge of power to prevent a shutdown. The next thing was the primitive computer they used to process their information from their reactors. It was very complicated to understand because it would have bewildering information that none of the operators could understand. This would cause great difficulty when trying to interpret the information accurately and quickly. The last issue was the gauges and switches were properly monitoring everything. They still haven't thought of all the monitoring devices that could be used to make it a safer reactor. Soviet officials did not warn the Chernobyl plant of the potential existence of all these faults in the engineering of the RBMK. They were afraid it would make them look foolish in Soviet nuclear industry. They skipped over safety issues and still continued to build the reactors in Chernobyl.
With all the dilemmas that the RBMK had it still might have not had any issues if it wasn't for the test operators error. They were attempting to collect data on the length of time that inertia would keep the turbines spinning in the event that the reactors had to be turned off. They started lowering the power output of reactor 4 at 1:05 on April 25, 1986.(1) They had a problem with the test it started requiring more power and they had to maintain the reactor at about fifty percent power for an additional nine hours. The experiment finally continued at 12:28 A.M., April 26, however they accidently lowered the power on the reactor to 1 percent operating power.(1) The RBMK became unstable as xenon gas(A neutron absorber formed in the core). To prevent the reactor from stopping all power output, the operators began to remove born control rods between 1:00 and 1:20AM, allowing power to rise to seven percent. Afraid that automatic shutdown of the reactor might occur. The operators shut off the emergency shutdown systems. At 1:23, steam was shunted to a turbine that was idle and spiked the power to increase the reactors water flow more quickly over the fuel elements.(1) This was the test allowing the operators to press the shutdown button to lower water flow over the fuel rods and see how long inertia would keep turbines running. Going back to they had all emergency backup off so nothing could prevent what was going to happen next the reactor heated up to 100 times its full operating power.
It started on April 26 1986 at 1:23A.M. it was a engineering failure in the nuclear reactor design and mistakes made by plant operator.(1) They were running tests on the back up cooling system. The nuclear reactor works like a giant steam engine uranium fuel rods react with the water to create a massive amount of steam that turns enormous turbines to create electricity(2). The RBMK-1000 reactor, the acronym RBMK means "reactor cooled by water and modified by graphite"(5). The reactor is a huge block stack of graphite with several hundred channels drilled vertically through the carbon matrix. Some channels have boron rods; boron rod is an excellent neutron absorber which serves as the control mechanism of the reactor. The boron control rods control the nuclear reaction this allows the operator to control the uranium rods temperatures that heat up the water to cool down the water around core. The boron control rods are inserted into the core to absorb neutrons. This is very important to keep cool running water over the core at all the times. Huge circulation pumps flush water through pipes over the uranium rods this is the thermal transfer medium, absorbing the heat from nuclear fission of the uranium rods, both to keep the core from melting and provide steam to spin the electricity producing turbines. The temperatures must maintain 700 Celsius.(1) The night of the 26th they pulled out almost all the control rods out and lost control of the amount of cool water running over the fuel rods. The heat was rampant and uncontrollable this led to severe overheating of the core where the fuel rods are stored. As the core temperature spiked to 100 times its normal operating power. The core began to heat up and eventually the reactor core shattered which led to a explosion spewing pieces of radioactive graphite and uranium throughout the destroyed reactor building and Ukrainian cou It was caused by a lack of safety precautions which should have been implemented in the design of the nuclear reactor RBMK-1000. They should have engineered more safety into the entire design and not let the human control take over the operation of the reactor. Chernobyl had four reactors it was one of the Soviet Union's most advanced facilities. The radiation released from the incident was 8 tons. (2) Radiation at this level is toxic to everything in the surrounding areas and still affects the surrounding areas today. They had to evacuate 115,000 people from the area around Chernobyl. (2) This was a mandatory evacuation that if it wasn't completed there would have been severe radiation poising or death. They had to get 500,000 different personnel to help clean up all the radiation and debris from the nuclear reactor sight.(2) There were a total of 31 initial deaths at Chernobyl. The radiation released was the equivalent of 400 Hiroshima bombs and the radiation covered Europe. This is tragedy that still is affecting the surrounding areas today.
The radioactive material blown into the atmosphere was carried by wind into the surrounding countryside, as well as distant republics. The Forrest around Chernobyl turned into a rust color because of the heavy radioactive contamination coming from the reactors explosion sight. Byelorussia, was hit hard by the contamination all the water supplies and air was contaminated. Nearby, city of Kiev, the radiation level peaked at an increase of 160 to 300 times what could be expected from normal background radiation(1). The Swiss banned fishing in some of their lakes and ponds because the radioactive isotopes that were released into the air. Chernobyl also takes the blame for all the live stock and agricultural products that radioactive poising occurred across Europe. For many years 75 percent of the reindeer in Sweden could not be consumed.(5)
The environmental impact is nothing compared to the gruesome human impact. Many people had serious radiation poisoning ranging from sickness, skin lesions, and death. This all took place in 1987 years after the Chernobyl reactor disaster they still felt the effects of this tragic event.
Chernobyl disaster was a horrific commercial nuclear power plant disaster it was the only one that had fatalities linked to the exploding nuclear reactor. This incident led to many changes in the safety cultures of Nuclear reactors around the Earth. The accident was a important reason for the failure of the Soviet Union. It is one of the reasons they changed their name to Russia.
They thought the RBMK was a safe alternative to more advanced pressurized water-cooled reactors, upon further inspection several engineering flaws became apparent. The British atomic Energy Authority releases a list of the seven engineering failures of why RBMK reactors would not be licensed with the United Kingdom. The leading cause was the lack of a containment structure to provide protection in the event of a meltdown. Soviet designers felt that there was no need to provide a massive containment structure to protect against an apparently highly unlikely failure. The second leading cause was in the event of a accident it would take full eighteen seconds to lower the boron control rods into the graphite pile, this is an eternity in the science of nuclear reactions.() The computer and software used was very hard for anyone to follow this led to a better computer system and user friendly software for safety measure s.
I believe they should have thought about the possibilities of this event happening. This is a engineers job to analyze things that could possible fail while running the plant. They seemed to rush into this entire reactor engineering plans. This carelessness of design has led many new safety precautions to be developed.
The next time I suggest add a heat sensor safety switch if these certain temperatures are present a automatic shutdown procedure of the uranium rods and safety cooling rods. They could have used a solar back up so they would have to do the turbine test to see if the plant will still produce power.
They are now building a containment structure that was completed in 2017. The New Safe Confinement (NSC) structure is an arch 110 meters high, 165 meters long and spanning 260 meters, covering both unit 4 and the Power Plant building.(4) The NSC is the largest movable land-based structure ever built. The hermetically sealed building will allow engineers to deconstruct the plant so they can get to the number four reactor and remove the fuel-containing materials(FCM) in the bottom of the reactor. This will allow them to remove a nuclear hazard at the site without spreading nuclear containments across the Ukraine. The NSC was about 1 to 2 billion to build and received support from 43 governments around the world. This will complete the tear down at Chernobyl of reactor four. This is a step on cleaning up the contamination completely. However, it will not be completely cleaned up until many years into the future after the contamination settles down and goes away.
Chernobyl today is a complete ghost town still non-inhabitable and unhealthy there are not many people living in the area around the Power Plant. Even surrounding areas you still won't find people because of the contamination. The lack of having good farm land is why most people have left the city in addition to the high radiation levels. Chernobyl still has tourists and people that work on assembling the RSC.
The Chernobyl disaster was both engineering and operating failure. New reactors have been engineered in a safer manner along with new computer hardware that elevates operator mistakes. Some new reactors have gravity fed tanks going over the core so they don't have to depend on the water being pumped over the core. This is a great hope for all reactors being created in the future as they create a safer energy source for Earth. I hope they have learned a great deal from this accident and nothing like this ever happens on Earth again. Science will continue forever but we learn from our engineering failures to build a better tomorrow for everybody.
References
1. https://chernobylguide.com/chernobyl_nuclear_power_plant/
2. The Chernobyl Disaster: How It Happened
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOWD0CBxE7w
3. WHY THE NUCLEAR ACCIDENT WAS PRODUCED IN THE CHERNOBYL PLANT ANIMATION
4.http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-accident.aspx
5.http://historywake.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-end-of-cold-war-ussr-in-decline.html
Explanation / Answer
They had the state of the art Nuclear reactor facility of their time but the Chernobyl Power Plant had a catastrophic meltdown(2). The Chernobyl Power Complex consisted of four nuclear reactors of the RBMK-1000 design. Units 1 and 2 were built between 1970 and 1977, while units 3 and 4 of the same design were completed in 1983. Each RBMK-1000 reactor produced a fission reaction of 3,200 megawatts of thermal energy. (1) What was the main engineering failure behind reactor 4 in the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster in the Soviet Union, which is now part of Ukraine? How was this epidemic handled by the Soviet Union and surrounding countries? Is this Nuclear Disaster still a threat to Ukraine and neighboring countries today? If it is, what are they doing to stop the nuclear radiation and prevent this from happening again? The scientific community deems it the worst environmental tragedy ever. This event is etched into history as a disastrous failure but many engineering solutions for nuclear reactors were brought to the light after this disaster.
The RBMK reactors tended to be highly unstable when the reactor was in low power settings. This could completely shut down the power within the reactor and require a lengthy restart time. When a collapse seemed threatening, operators did the riskiest thing possible by removing more boron rods than Soviet regulations allowed. This would give the reactor a surge of power to prevent a shutdown. The next thing was the primitive computer they used to process their information from their reactors. It was very complicated to understand because it would have bewildering information that none of the operators could understand. This would cause great difficulty when trying to interpret the information accurately and quickly. The last issue was the gauges and switches were properly monitoring everything. They still haven't thought of all the monitoring devices that could be used to make it a safer reactor. Soviet officials did not warn the Chernobyl plant of the potential existence of all these faults in the engineering of the RBMK. They were afraid it would make them look foolish in Soviet nuclear industry. They skipped over safety issues and still continued to build the reactors in Chernobyl.
With all the dilemmas that the RBMK had it still might not have had any issues if it wasn't for the test operators error. They were attempting to collect data on the length of time that inertia would keep the turbines spinning in the event that the reactors had to be turned off. They started lowering the power output of reactor 4 at 1:05 on April 25, 1986.(1) They had a problem with the test it started requiring more power and they had to maintain the reactor at about fifty percent power for an additional nine hours. The experiment finally continued at 12:28 A.M., April 26, however, they accidentally lowered the power on the reactor to 1 percent operating power.(1) The RBMK became unstable as xenon gas(A neutron absorber formed in the core). To prevent the reactor from stopping all power output, the operators began to remove born control rods between 1:00 and 1:20 AM, allowing power to rise to seven percent. Afraid that automatic shutdown of the reactor might occur. The operators shut off the emergency shutdown systems. At 1:23, steam was shunted to a turbine that was idle and spiked the power to increase the reactor's water flow more quickly over the fuel elements.(1) This was the test allowing the operators to press the shutdown button to lower water flow over the fuel rods and see how long inertia would keep turbines running. Going back to they had all emergency backup off so nothing could prevent what was going to happen next the reactor heated up to 100 times its full operating power.
It started on April 26, 1986, at 1:23 A.M. it was an engineering failure in the nuclear reactor design and mistakes made by the plant operator.(1) They were running tests on the backup cooling system. The nuclear reactor works like a giant steam engine uranium fuel rods react with the water to create a massive amount of steam that turns enormous turbines to create electricity(2). The RBMK-1000 reactor, the acronym RBMK means "reactor cooled by water and modified by graphite"(5). The reactor is a huge block stack of graphite with several hundred channels drilled vertically through the carbon matrix. Some channels have boron rods; boron rod is an excellent neutron absorber which serves as the control mechanism of the reactor. The boron control rods control the nuclear reaction this allows the operator to control the uranium rods temperatures that heat up the water to cool down the water around the core. The boron control rods are inserted into the core to absorb neutrons. This is very important to keep cool running water over the core at all the times. Huge circulation pumps flush water through pipes over the uranium rods this is the thermal transfer medium, absorbing the heat from nuclear fission of the uranium rods, both to keep the core from melting and provide steam to spin the turbines that produce electricity. The temperatures must maintain 700 Celsius.(1) The night of the 26th they pulled out almost all the control rods out and lost control of the amount of cool water running over the fuel rods. The heat was rampant and uncontrollable this led to severe overheating of the core where the fuel rods are stored. As the core temperature spiked to 100 times its normal operating power. The core began to heat up and eventually the reactor core shattered which led to an explosion spewing pieces of radioactive graphite and uranium throughout the destroyed reactor building and Ukrainian crew. It was caused by a lack of safety precautions which should have been implemented in the design of the nuclear reactor RBMK-1000. They should have engineered more safety into the entire design and not let the human control take over the operation of the reactor. Chernobyl had four reactors it was one of the Soviet Union's most advanced facilities. The radiation released from the incident was 8 tons. (2) Radiation at this level is toxic to everything in the surrounding areas and still affects the surrounding areas today. They had to evacuate 115,000 people from the area around Chernobyl. (2) This was a mandatory evacuation that if it wasn't completed there would have been severe radiation poising or death. They had to get 500,000 different personnel to help clean up all the radiation and debris from the site of the nuclear reactor.(2) There were a total of 31 initial deaths at Chernobyl. The radiation released was the equivalent of 400 Hiroshima bombs and the radiation covered Europe. This is a tragedy that is still affecting the surrounding areas today.
The radioactive material blown into the atmosphere was carried by the wind into the surrounding countryside, as well as distant republics. The Forrest around Chernobyl turned into a rust color because of the heavy radioactive contamination coming from the reactors explosion sight. Byelorussia was hit hard by the contamination all the water supplies and the air was contaminated. Nearby, in the city of Kiev, radiation level peaked at an increase of 160 to 300 times what could be expected from normal background radiation(1). The Swiss banned fishing in some of their lakes and ponds because the radioactive isotopes that were released into the air. Chernobyl also takes the blame for all the livestock and agricultural products that radioactive poising occurred across Europe. For many years 75 percent of the reindeer in Sweden could not be consumed.(5)
The environmental impact is nothing compared to the gruesome human impact. Many people had serious radiation poisoning ranging from sickness, skin lesions, and death. This all took place in 1987 years after the Chernobyl reactor disaster they still felt the effects of this tragic event.
Chernobyl disaster was a horrific commercial nuclear power plant disaster it was the only one that had fatalities linked to the exploding nuclear reactor. This incident led to many changes in the safety cultures of Nuclear reactors around the Earth. The accident was an important reason for the failure of the Soviet Union. It is one of the reasons they changed their name to Russia.
They thought the RBMK was a safe alternative to more advanced pressurized water-cooled reactors, upon further inspection several engineering flaws became apparent. The British atomic Energy Authority releases a list of the seven engineering failures of why RBMK reactors would not be licensed in the United Kingdom. The leading cause was the lack of a containment structure to provide protection in the event of a meltdown. Soviet designers felt that there was no need to provide a massive containment structure to protect against an apparently highly unlikely failure. The second leading cause was in the event of an accident it would take full eighteen seconds to lower the boron control rods into the graphite pile, this is an eternity in the science of nuclear reactions.() The computer and software used were very hard for anyone to follow this led to a better computer system and user-friendly software for safety measure s.
I believe they should have thought about the possibilities of this event happening. This is a engineers job to analyze things that could possibly fail while running the plant. They seemed to rush into this entire reactor engineering plans. This carelessness of design has led many new safety precautions to be developed.
The next time I suggest add a heat sensor safety switch if these certain temperatures are present an automatic shutdown procedure of the uranium rods and safety cooling rods. They could have used a solar back up so they would have to do the turbine test to see if the plant will still produce power.
They are now building a containment structure that was completed in 2017. The New Safe Confinement (NSC) structure is an arch 110 meters high, 165 meters long and spanning 260 meters, covering both unit 4 and the Power Plant building.(4) The NSC is the largest movable land-based structure ever built. The hermetically sealed building will allow engineers to deconstruct the plant so they can get to the number four reactor and remove the fuel-containing materials(FCM) in the bottom of the reactor. This will allow them to remove a nuclear hazard at the site without spreading nuclear containments across Ukraine. The NSC was about 1 to 2 billion to build and received support from 43 governments around the world. This will complete the teardown at Chernobyl of reactor four. This is a step in cleaning up the contamination completely. However, it will not be completely cleaned up until many years into the future after the contamination settles down and goes away.
Chernobyl today is a complete ghost town still non-inhabitable and unhealthy there are not many people living in the area around the Power Plant. Even surrounding areas you still won't find people because of the contamination. The lack of having good farmland is why most people have left the city in addition to the high radiation levels. Chernobyl still has tourists and people that work on assembling the RSC.
The Chernobyl disaster was both engineering and operating failure. New reactors have been engineered in a safer manner along with new computer hardware that elevates operator mistakes. Some new reactors have gravity fed tanks going over the core so they don't have to depend on the water being pumped over the core. This is a great hope for all reactors being created in the future as they create a safer energy source for Earth. I hope they have learned a great deal from this accident and nothing like this ever happens on Earth again. Science will continue forever but we learn from our engineering failures to build a better tomorrow for everybody.
References:
1. https://chernobylguide.com/chernobyl_nuclear_power_plant/
2. The Chernobyl Disaster: How It Happened
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOWD0CBxE7w
3. WHY THE NUCLEAR ACCIDENT WAS PRODUCED IN THE CHERNOBYL PLANT ANIMATION
4.http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/chernobyl-accident.aspx
5.http://historywake.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-end-of-cold-war-ussr-in-decline.html
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