EES 0836 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Half-Life, Gas Explosion, Plutonium
3 Apr 2016
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Lecture 9: instilled fear in american public, fueled by movies like the china syndrome, the chernobyl disaster, blatant disregard for safety plus inherently unstable design spelled disaster, chernobyl was a boiling-water, graphite-moderated design. Frequent exchange of rods to harvest pu meant lack of containment vessel. Positive-feedback built in: gets too hot, it runs hotter: runaway possible. Once runaway initiated, control rods not effective like the ones in u. s: chernobyl, continued, on april 25, 1986, operators decided to do an experiment as the reactor was powering down for routine maintenance. Disabled emergency cooling system: blatant violation of safety rules. Reactor went out of control, caused steam explosion that ripped open the. Many fires, exposed core, major radioactive release reactor: chernobyl after-effects, total of 100 million people exposed (135,000 lived within 30 km) to, expect from 25,000 to 50,000 cancer deaths as a result radioactivity much above natural levels. Compared to 20 million total worldwide from other causes.
