Keith, > Here the author implies that the Chernobyl accident was due to some major fault in the reactor design and implementation, carefully ignoring the fact that the real accident, as it occurred in the real world that you and I live in, was due to technicians shutting off all of the fail-safe systems and intentionally driving the reactor to failure.
NO NO NO !!! Just to clear up one major point and continuation of a line of disinformation put out by the Soviets. The Chernobyl reactor design - and not the irresponsible acts of the employees - caused the accident. You are falling for the same bogus story put out by the Soviets to protect their other reactor assets - also flawed from day-one. And make no mistake, the "immediate cause" of the accident was worker stupidity but the accident was absolutely inevitable, given the flawed design (now changed). We were actually taught this in the 60s as part of a reactor design course. The US considered but rejected this design in the 50s (it is a cheaper design and needs far less enrichment the PWR). This Soviet design has a fatal flaw in that the coolant (light water) is NOT the moderator. The moderator - carbon - has far less thermal neutron cross-section than does the coolant, so in a loss-of-coolant accident, your reactivity goes way UP instead of down, and exponentially fast, it should be added. In all US designed reactors, loss-of-coolant shuts the reactor down because the coolant IS also the moderator: HUGE difference. We even told this the Soviets this back in the 60s in great detail - yet they persisted with a totally flawed design because it was cheap, plus they did not educate the workers well enough about the fatal consequences of loss-of-coolant. In a US reactor, this loss would shut the reactor down over time, as it did at TMI but in their flawed design, loss of coolant exponentially increases the reactivity of the core - and failure is guaranteed. This fault goes straight back to the Soviet bureauracracy and their lack of accountability for anything other than the lowest-cost solution- and not exactly to the workers themselves, however stupid their actions were (and they were *stupid* beyond all comprehension but yet that was not the ultimate problem). Jones
