<<i>During a routine test on April 26, 1986, reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced a power surge that triggered an emergency shutdown.</i>><p>Not routine. Operators disabled numerous safety features to perform a turbine spin-down test before shutting down the reactor for scheduled maintenance. The power surge was due to putting the reactor in an unstable state before shutdown. The safety features they bypassed were designed to keep the reactor out of the unstable operating region.
From the article:<p><i>"Two minutes of exposure and your cells will soon begin to hemorrhage;"</i><p>It is sad to see this level of sensationalism in first 3 lines of the article.<p>Not only cells CAN'T hemorrhage by definition (hemorrhage is blood escaping from the circulatory system, cells don't have blood inside them), but that claim is completely made up, not present in the NRC article linked. Any decent level of fact-checking would have caught that.<p>Making up fake definitions for precise medical terms for the sake of impact is really bad journalism.<p>And then it's followed by:<p><i>"During a routine test on April 26, 1986, reactor Number 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant experienced a power surge that triggered an emergency shutdown."</i><p><i>"If it hits ground water, it could trigger another catastrophic explosion or leach radioactive material into the water nearby residents drink."</i><p>Which is contradicted by the article itself:<p><i>"Oozing through pipes and eating through concrete, the radioactive lava flow from reactor Number 4 eventually cooled enough to solidfy[sic]."</i>
>Born of human error, continually generating copious heat, the Elephant’s Foot is still melting into the base of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant<p>I don't think that's true. The corium had cooled down when they discovered the elephant's foot. It's still extremely radioactive, but not melting hot.
Chernobyl is prime example health and safety gone wrong, the accident happened because they were doing safety tests on backup generators.<p>this is the kind of scenario where the ticking off boxes mentality should not be welcome.<p>things should have been done the long way, i.e giving people a blackout while they were doing those tests.<p>they also gave the testing duties to the night shift because they ran out of time.<p>prime example not to test things in production, but also not test things for testing's sake (especially in production)
> If it hits ground water, it could trigger another catastrophic explosion or leach radioactive material into the water nearby residents drink.<p>The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is ~1,000mi^2 ... this is 80% the size of the state of Rhode Island. "Nearby" residends?<p>Whole article is just kinda sloppy
> The first explosion from the steam inside the reactor was enough to send the 4-million-pound lid of the reactor assembly through the roof of the building.<p>4 <i>million</i> pounds? Is that right? Just for comparison, the maximum takeoff weight of a 747 is 735,000 pounds. Less than a quarter of the weight of this lid?
There is an article about that famous photo of Elephant's Foot: <a href="http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-famous-photo-of-chernobyls-most-dangerous-radioactive-material-was-a-selfie" rel="nofollow">http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-famous-photo-of-che...</a>
One of my favorite videos, BBC Horizon's 20 year old Inside Chernobyl's Sarcophagus. There are details of "the elephant's foot" at around 16m. <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x223h9r_bbc-horizon-1996-inside-chernobyl-s-sarcophagus_shortfilms" rel="nofollow">http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x223h9r_bbc-horizon-1996-in...</a><p>Most interesting thing I learned is that the primary cause of death of the scientists who at that time were still researching the resulting decay, was from heart failure and strokes.
I read an interesting article a while back on making reactors safe using helium gas:<p><a href="https://www.cfact.org/2011/03/17/nuclear-safety-reactors-that-cant-meltdown/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cfact.org/2011/03/17/nuclear-safety-reactors-tha...</a><p>Personally I'm not terribly worried about meltdowns but rather terrorist getting hold of the waste and making dirty bombs but even that seems fairly unlikely (that is the pros outweigh the cons given todays technology).
how about creating electricity from Chernobyl's background radiation? <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/mrs-online-proceedings-library-archive/article/direct-energy-conversion-from-gamma-ray-to-electricity-using-silicon-semiconductor-cells/AD86142E057DC2D41E77AD7E28DD10A7" rel="nofollow">https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/mrs-online-proceedin...</a>
Related: some days ago Mammoet placed a big tent over Chernobil: <a href="http://www.mammoet.com/en/news/mammoet-completes-installation-of-new-safe-confinement-in-chernobyl/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mammoet.com/en/news/mammoet-completes-installatio...</a>