Nuclear power

[Anomalocaris]

And it's also worth noting that Chernobyl failed because they decided to do an extremely risky test that could only work well under some very specific circumstances and they did everything so wrong that if HBO hadn't done their Chernobyl miniseries and on the off-chance that FOX ever decides to end The Simpsons, they could have done the Chernobyl .

The fact that the reactor was out-of-date and that the plant didn't actually have a proper containment structure (something that most Western nuclear reactors tend to take for granted) didn't help things. And that's to say nothing of the incompetence of the people who worked there, something the miniseries exaggerated only slightly.





The problem, on several levels, seems to be rooted more in the flaws in the Soviet system than anything inherent in nuclear power, from the RBMK design that was specifically created to cut corners (for instance, instead of the standard steel-reinforced concrete containers, all that separated the core from the outside world was a single lid that could be and was blown off by a sufficiently large explosion) to staffing them with people who valued their place in the party far more than, y'know, making sure the damn reactor doesn't explode, and when it does explode, caring more about how bad it would be for them if it were true than trying to contain the fucking radiation before it's too late.

It is untrue and unfair to say RBMK was specifically designed to cut corners.   Every commercial nuclear reactor design must consider multiple economic factors or else it will never be built.    HBO specially decided to heavily shade that aspect of the story with its portrayal of Legasov’s testimony so as to pander to popular western prejudice.      In reality Legasov never gave such testimony, and was not called as witness during the trial.     The real background story how RBMK design contributes to Chernobyl accident was much more complicated.   RBMK has several very unusual, but compelling intrinsic safety characteristics amongst the world’s commercial reactors.    As a result, careful economic and safety analysis would recommend different combination of safety features for RBMK than PWR And BWR type reactors common in the west.   But that is not the same as “designed to cut corners” 

What is true is the RBMK reactor as specifically implemented in Chernobyl reveal deep disfunction across Soviet establishment, only some of which was touched upon by the show.     Plus there was also contribution to the accident from the fact that there was an hidden Soviet agenda to adapt the reactor to dual use by configuring it to refine parts of its fuel into weapons grade uranium as it runs, that was never discussed during in the show.    

Chernobyl accident itself revealed a pervasive macho culture of risk taking amongst their World War II generation and gerenation that grew up immediately after WW2, which ran Chernobyl.   As an indication of the chevalier attitude to safety,  Chernobyl was frequently run with emergency cooling loop shut down because it was too much trouble to recall the shift to work start the cooling loop.    As it turns out when Chernobyl accident occurred the emergency cooling loop had been shut down for 10 hours.