Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Underneath, there was a cross-sectioned model of the reactor building in its pre-accident
state. As I peered into it to get a view of the reactor's inner workings, two docents lurk-
ing by the door noticed my interest. Moving with the curt authority of guards, they rushed
forward to turn the model on, groping at a control panel attached to the base. The model
reactor glowed warmly, showing the normal circulation of water in the core. But the wo-
men were unsatisfied. Fussing in Ukrainian, they began flipping the switch back and forth,
wiggling and slapping the little control panel with increasing fervor. Finally, they jiggled
the switch just right, and the rest of the reactor's systems—water and steam pipes, cooling
systems and boilers—flickered to life.
To understand the Chernobyl accident, it helps to know something about how electricity
gets generated and, specifically, about nuclear power—though not so much that your eyes
glaze over.
In general, power plants generate electricity by spinning turbines. Picture a big hamster
wheel and you get the idea. Each turbine is connected to a generator, in which a conductor
turns through the field of a strong magnet, thus creating electricity by magic. Men in hard
hats then distribute this power to entire continents full of televisions and toaster ovens.
The ageless question, then, is just how to spin all those damn turbines. You can build a
dam to collect huge volumes of water that you can let rush through your turbines. You can
build windmills with little generators that get powered by the turning rotors. Or you can
boil a lot of water and force the steam into the turbine under high pressure.
This last one works great, but you need a hell of a lot of heat to make enough steam.
Where are you going to get it? Well, you can burn coal, natural gas, or even trash, if you
like. That, or you can cook up some nuclear fission.
Oh,
fission.
People make it sound so complicated, but any chump can get the basics. It
involves—to skip most of the physics—piling up a giant stack of purified uranium to make
your reactor's core. You'll have to mix some graphite in with the uranium, to mellow out
the neutrons it's emitting.
We good? Okay. Once you've got the core together, install some plumbing in it so you
can run water through to carry off the heat, and then just stand back and cross your fingers.
A few of the uranium atoms in your core will spontaneously split—they're funny that
way—and when they do, they'll give off heat and some neutrons. It doesn't matter if you
don't know what neutrons are, other than that they're tiny and will shoot off like bullets,
colliding with neighboring uranium atoms and causing
them
to split. This will give off
more heat and more neutrons, which will cause still further atoms to split, and so on, and so
