this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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34
why did chernobyl operators ignore all warnings and safety measures leading to the accident? (self.genzedong)
submitted 2 weeks ago by bunitor to c/genzedong@lemmygrad.ml
13 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

this might be a little off-topic, but I don't know where else to ask

i saw a video simulating the real time unfolding of the chernobyl disaster and it blew my mind how much the engineers ignored every warning and security measure possible

(yt link for those interested: https://youtu.be/WMr3-ShzB08)

why would they do this? i'm not a nuclear engineer, but i'd much rather risk my job, my career and leave millions of people without electricity than push the safety thresholds even by the tiniest bit. trying to look for explanations online leads to liberal, anticommunist bullshit like "russian incompetence" or "they wouldn't dare question the generals" or whatever. i want an actual, technical (and social) explanation without any liberal bias, which is why i'm asking it here

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[–] Comprehensive49@lemmygrad.ml 48 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

They were running tests, so some warnings were expected.

Accidents are kinda inevitable with new technologies, especially nuclear. The US actually had its main nuclear accident, Three Mile Island, in 1979, which was quite a bit earlier than the USSR's Chernobyl in 1986. The human errors that caused both accidents were quite similar, the US just had a slightly better reactor design that prevented the same steam blowout that Chernobyl suffered.

Because of the backdrop of the Cold War, the US didn't share anything it learned from its mistakes at Three Mile Island with the Soviet Union.

Notice that after their respective disasters, the USA and USSR/Russia have not had similar meltdowns again. Since the end of the Cold War, no accidents have been caused again by similar issues due to the sharing of reactor info.

The Fukushima meltdown was due to corporate incompetence and skimping on disaster preparedness by TEPCO, so isn't comparable.

[–] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 14 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Another interesting note about Fukushima: in some other prefectures the NPP sites were designated safe spaces for people evacuated from their homes in preparation for the tsunamis, including NPP sites on the pacific coast just like Fukushima.

I also despise how Fukushima was used as the final excuse for Germany to ban nuclear power, as if Germany is at any risk for a tsunami (although they are of course at risk from corporate incompetence).

[–] Comprehensive49@lemmygrad.ml 15 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Germany's coal lobby screwed them so hard. Germany's fossil fuel lobby also promised to replace nuclear with a 'hydrogen economy' that still doesn't exist, and won't exist for at least the next decade.

Now Germany's about to run out of electricity.

[–] ahriboy@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Germany should restart nuclear energy. EU is already falling with nuclear decomissionings.

[–] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 week ago

For as bad as things are with regards to energy in Germany right now, they'll have to get a whole lot worse before people are ready to accept nuclear again. Germans are absolutely terrified of nuclear power, apparently more so than losing all of their energy intensive industry.

[–] knfrmity@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 week ago

German energy politics is a complete dumpster fire.

[–] MasterDeeLuke@lemmygrad.ml 12 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I also want add that Japan also had that one incident with Hisashi Ouchi in 1999, the guy was said to have one of the most painful deaths of any person ever.

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 2 weeks ago

Hisashi Ouchi

I never heard about him before so just read about, and holy shit, manually handling uranium by buckets is not something i would expect in 1999

Ouchi was standing at a tank, holding a funnel, while a co-worker named Masato Shinohara poured a mixture of intermediate-enriched uranium oxide into it from a bucket.

[–] multitotal@lemmygrad.ml 25 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

it blew my mind how much the engineers ignored every warning and security measure possible

Iirc, it was because they were running a test and they expected warnings. But it was something about one shift not telling another that the safety valves were actually off (or something like that). Even though wikipedia is a terrible source I think they have a minute by minute breakdown of the events leading up to it.

[–] cayde6ml@lemmygrad.ml 16 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

This, and also the fact that the reactor had an outdated design. I can't entirely fault the USSR for that design, and I'm not a technical expert, you have to make do with what you have. But the way the shutdown method supposedly worked, was that it would cause a temporary spike before the cooling could begin. Even if they did try to shut it down earlier, it might still have failed.

[–] PaX@hexbear.net 17 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The AZ-5 system doesn't cause significant power excursions in most cases

The reason it did on the night of April 26th is because the operators had negligently removed so many control rods completely from the core that the graphite tips of the removed control rods were able to displace water in the core upon being reinserted and make the already extremely dangerous power excursion situation even worse

There are still many RBMKs operating safely in the world and I think they have an undeservedly bad reputation, but yeah, they should be shut down and replaced lol. They lack many modern safety features, the worst omission being the lack of an outer reactor containment building (which may have prevented the disaster from being so bad). The design is impressive for the time and place where they were developed but yeh

[–] PaX@hexbear.net 20 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

It's rly complicated and mired in so much politics, I'm not rly sure either :(

The western experts or people who watched that anti-communist HBO show and consider themselves experts now lol tend toward overfocusing on the "design flaw" (the control rod tips inducing a positive void coefficient in the reactor was actually intentional but their characteristics in possible dangerous situations were not properly communicated to operators) when the primary reason the disaster happened was incompetence and negligence of the night shift of reactor 4 trying to rush the turbine test through. It maybe wouldn't have happened without the design flaw but it also could have been averted by just not doing one of the many negligent things that the operators did to the reactor

There was a criminal trial of the operators and an official report was commissioned in the USSR, I found a translation of the report (unsure of accuracy) and it's VERY detailed, you might get something out of it: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1536/ML15365A567.pdf

There are also the INSAG reports from the IAEA you could check out: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.pdf (I can't find the first one for some reason)

[–] TankieReplyBot@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 weeks ago

I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: