A Physicists Visit to Chernobyl: Digging a little deeper
Following people’s comments after my first article on visiting the exclusion zone, the main one was the people would like to see more of the area. So, with that in mind in this article I’ve prepared a more in depth look at two of the areas I visited:
- Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plan
- Power Plant Laundry
But it is worth covering a bit of what occurred to cause one of the worst nuclear disasters in history.
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
I do not want to go into a great bit of detail or give my opinions on what who was to blame, but it is worth giving an idea of what occurred. Many others have gone into much more detail and a good starting point is the Wikipedia article for anyone before buying any of the books.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is not a single reactor but was actually comprised of four working RBMK-1000 reactors and a further two reactors that were under construction. If you look at the area (figure below) you can see that the entire plant is huge with massive cooling lakes designed to take the hot exhaust water round a long trip to cool before they come back to be ingested by the reactors.
