Chernobyl

Chernobyl teaches some fascinating and important history, science, and leadership lessons by diving into the details of the events leading up to the worst nuclear disaster in human history and its aftermath.

Nuclear power plants have a lot of potential to generate significant amounts of clean energy. They do this by making nuclear fission happen. This is easiest with chemicals like Uranium, which are put into rods.

Engineers control the process with water and “control rods” that slow down the reactivity of the elements inside the core. When these rods are inside the reactor, the process slows down. By removing them, however, nuclear fission is free to carry on and the plant generates more energy.

But these facilities aren’t without their dangers. In some cases, like a bombing, the reactor can lose power and catastrophic failures are not far behind.

This is one reason it was important for personnel at the Chernobyl power plant to conduct a safety test. Their aim was to see how the plant would do if it lost power for a short amount of time. They had backup generators, but the 45 seconds these took to restore power was dangerously long.

The aim was to find out if the reactor could safely power itself while the backup power system started up. So the plant workers intentionally lowered the electricity input. They did this by removing the control rods from the reactor while simultaneously reducing input power to the plant.

But the test which began in the early hours of April 26, 1986, went horribly wrong.

It’s Friday afternoon and the night crew is beginning their shift at Chernobyl. However, the leader, Yuri Tregub, didn’t feel well-acquainted with the procedure for the test they had to conduct that night. Luckily, or rather unluckily, Anatoly Dyatlov, deputy chief-engineer was there to oversee the operation. By 10 pm the team had the go-ahead to begin, and by 11 Dyatlov had arrived. Although Tregub asked for help, Dyatlov dismissed his questions. This arrogant leader pushed the team to keep working regardless of their uncertainties because he didn’t know about the fatal design flaw in the reactor. They began the test anyway, reducing power in the reactor. Dyatlov continued to scold the crew for not working fast enough despite their questions. When the machine struggled to maintain power on its own, Dyatlov only pushed them to keep going. Eventually, only nine control rods remained in the core. Even though power was low, the enormous amount of nuclear reactions boiled all water in the reactor into steam. The rapid increase in temperature spiked the power and Leonid Totunov pressed the emergency shutdown button, sending all control rods back in. But the RBMK…