Back to Talking About Chernobyl

So, it has been a while since any radioactive information has been spilled over this disaster on this blog page. Today, I will be going through how this wonderful Soviet reactor made a big mess a little more.
The Chernobyl Power Plant in Northern Ukraine was, to say the least, not very safe. The way this specific reactor worked was that it provided its own power to run the water pumps that pumped cool water into the reactor to keep it from overheating and resulting in a core meltdown. This meant that once the reactor was shut off, residual heat from the reaction continued to heat water inside of the reactor. See where I’m getting? There was about a one-minute window between the shutdown of the reactor and the startup of the backup diesel generators to provide power for the remaining cooling.