Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
This is a little bit like stalling your car on the highway and trying to use its coasting mo-
mentum to run the AC. But in this case, it involved a three-stories-tall pile of nuclear fuel.
Over the course of several hours, the reactor failed to run hot enough for the experiment
to proceed, so more and more control rods were pulled out of the core to juice the chain
reaction up to a suitable level. Meanwhile, the flow of water through the core had dropped
below normal levels, allowing more and more heat and steam to build up inside the reactor,
a condition that made it dangerously volatile. The built-in systems to prevent all this from
taking place were among the safeguards that had been shut off so the test could proceed.
In the wee hours of April 26, the operators noticed a spike in the heat and power coming
from the reactor and realized that, if the control rods weren't reinserted immediately, the
reactor would run out of control. It is assumed that they pushed the panic button to drop
the control rods back into the core and stop the chain reaction—but panic was not enough.
Not only were the rods too slow in sinking down into the reactor, but as they did so, they
also displaced even more water, actually increasing the rate of reaction for a moment. The
horrified engineers were powerless to stop it.
Within seconds, the power level in the core outstripped its normal operational level by
a hundredfold. The water in the core exploded into superheated steam, blowing the two-
thousand-ton reactor shield off the core. Moments later another explosion—possibly of
steam, possibly of hydrogen, possibly an event called a nuclear
excursion
—punched a gap-
ing hole in the top of the building. Bits of nuclear fuel rained down on the reactor complex
and nearby landscape, setting the building and its surroundings on fire.
Inside the core, unknown to the panicking staff, the superheated blocks of graphite that
formed the matrix of the reactor had also burst into flame, and the remaining nuclear fuel,
completely uncontrolled, was melting into a radioactive lava that would burrow its way
into the basement. All the while, radioactive smoke, dust, and steam spewed into the sky, a
giant nuclear geyser that continued to erupt for days on end.
Before long, radiation sensors in Sweden were picking up the downwind contamination,
and American spy satellites were focusing on the belching ruin of the reactor building, and
the whole world was wondering exactly what the hell had happened in Chernobyl. In some
ways, we still don't know.
My pants made nylon swooshing sounds as I descended the musty stairwell of my apart-
ment building. I had bought a tracksuit for my weekend trip to Chernobyl, which made me
look like a Ukrainian jackass circa 1990, but it was disposable in case of contamination.
