Chernobyl: HBO Miniseries

[Chance]

Saw this advertised before the Game of Thrones episode last night. Scheduled to debut May 6th. I hope they do the story justice.

[Casual Friday]

Well, it definitely looks better than "The Chernobyl Diaries" that's for sure.

[Gadfly]

I definitely will watch. Not to diminish the disaster but they give tours of the actual facility these days. Wildlife is thriving. Not saying I want to buy a condo there... but it is not the wasteland that was predicted.

In reading on the disaster a few years back, they were apparently doing an emergency shit down drill, testing procedures. Allegedly, the automatic safety features were kicking on during the testing. So they did not get to see if their procedure would work. These were procedures to use IF the automatic shutdown and safety system failed.

[incoming dumbass alert] to practice the drill, management had the workers disconnect the emergency shut down systems. This took time. Several delays followed, and there was a shift change. The new shift came in and began the drill. But they did not know the safety systems were manually disabled. [emoji2369][emoji35]. They started their testing, and the new procedures were not shutting down the reactor. They hit the emergency shut down buttons... the ones that had been manually disconnected by the prior shift. In a couple of minutes, it was too late. The coolant pumps shut down, and the water flashes to steam.... BOOM.

My details are fuzzy from how long ago I read that. But those were the broad strokes. The reactor was fine until the workers went and jacked with it in the name a “safety drill”... as with airline disasters, cascading failures and mistakes at multiple points were needed for it to melt down.


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[TAZ]

The failure supposedly came as a result of safety tests being performed outside the performance envelope of the reactor. That combined with the usual Socialist practice of corner cutting, under rug sweeping of known issues on a scale unimaginable to most...

Bad combo.

I hope they don’t go liberal no nukes bullkaka abs just tell the story. Not holding my breath. I’ll wager they will portray nuclear energy as the death of humanity and mother gaya. Hope I’m wrong.

[Chance]

My details are fuzzy from how long ago I read that. But those were the broad strokes. The reactor was fine until the workers went and jacked with it in the name a “safety drill”... as with airline disasters, cascading failures and mistakes at multiple points were needed for it to melt down.

I believe that's essentially what happened, but it's also been years since I've read about it. Maybe @Tom_Jones can explain it to us.

I think they wanted to see how much power the steam turbines would generate while they were in the process of shutting down, just in case the auxiliary generators failed in an emergency and weren't available to operate the respective safety systems. However, the system was specifically intended to not be operated in such a fashion, so they had to disable safety mechanisms to continue the experiment. So they disabled the safety systems to test the system's safety.

I also thought I saw reports Ukraine was doing away with the exclusion zone, but I can't find mention of that online. Visiting Pripyat is on my bucket list.

[ralph]

Wonder how much radiation those guys in the pic picked up while standing there? If I lived close to a nuke plant, and woke up one morning to see that, I'd be in the car with a few belongings, and headed in the opposite direction that the wind is blowing..

[Aray]

I definitely will watch. Not to diminish the disaster but they give tours of the actual facility these days. Wildlife is thriving. Not saying I want to buy a condo there... but it is not the wasteland that was predicted.

In reading on the disaster a few years back, they were apparently doing an emergency shit down drill, testing procedures. Allegedly, the automatic safety features were kicking on during the testing. So they did not get to see if their procedure would work. These were procedures to use IF the automatic shutdown and safety system failed.

[incoming dumbass alert] to practice the drill, management had the workers disconnect the emergency shut down systems. This took time. Several delays followed, and there was a shift change. The new shift came in and began the drill. But they did not know the safety systems were manually disabled. [emoji2369][emoji35]. They started their testing, and the new procedures were not shutting down the reactor. They hit the emergency shut down buttons... the ones that had been manually disconnected by the prior shift. In a couple of minutes, it was too late. The coolant pumps shut down, and the water flashes to steam.... BOOM.

My details are fuzzy from how long ago I read that. But those were the broad strokes. The reactor was fine until the workers went and jacked with it in the name a “safety drill”... as with airline disasters, cascading failures and mistakes at multiple points were needed for it to melt down.


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It was a test to see how long they could continue operation as their pumps coasted down after losing electrical power. The auto trips were manually defeated on purpose, otherwise the automatic scram signals would trip the reactor and insert all control rods.

The issue was that their load dispatchers kept them at a reduced power due to electrical grid demands and they had a xenon transient. Xenon is a poison that reduces the reactivity in the core and builds up after a downpower.

So while they hung out waiting to be allowed to take the unit offline, xenon was building in, requiring them to withdraw control rods to stay online, adding positive reactivity. They had several control rods that were not supposed to be withdrawn normally, but to meet the conditions of the test and keep the reactor critical, they did, because of the negative reactivity being added from the xenon building in. This put them outside of their design configuration and into a nearly impossible to control situation.

By time they realized they were screwed and needed to trip because they had added too much positive reactivity by pulling too many control rods, it was too late. The core design was such that when any the control rods that were fully withdrawn were initially inserted, that actually added more positive reactivity. They did. The reactor went prompt critical and flashed the water in the core to steam, causing the damage we've all seen in pics and videos.

That's what I remember from the mandatory retraining every 3-5 years.

[Chance]

That first episode was fantastic. I don't think it could have been any better. This is going to be a phenomenal series.

[TAZ]

That first episode was fantastic. I don't think it could have been any better. This is going to be a phenomenal series.

Agree. I’m actually surprised at just how hard the normally liberal HBO hammered the POS communists whose only concern was covering their asses. Hopefully, they keep that motif going and hammer home the idiocy of that system.

The story needs to be told honestly. Nuclear energy has a place in modern society IMO, but the only way to do so is to get rid of the idiotic No Nukes mentality fed by BS politically motivated misinformation. There are a lot of handcuffs placed on research and development in the arena that are purely driven by idiots making emotional arguments based on piss poor information. That needs to stop as I don’t see the energy needs of this planet dropping in the future.

[blues]

Thanks for mentioning it. Set it to record.