Comments by "Arthur Mosel" (@arthurmosel808) on "Kyle Hill" channel.

One of the best that I have seen.
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Something left out, the sensors to detect the actual water level, besides not working) won't report the water level in that condition, they failed treporting full. Plants were retrofitted with sensors that accurately reflected water level in the core, plants under construction had to make design changes to do that. Another point, the plants constructor had only built one nuclear plant before (if my memory serves me right). GE (BWRs) and Westinghouse (PWRs) had built most of the plants in the US to this point. Both, at this point, developed standard designs which reflected there experience which permitted more standardized training and procedures. This would have reduced construction and operating costs.
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No one ever did, and the person who did it may have even been a NRC employee.
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Chernobyl was not a maintenence accident, there was a test of an operation. This test should not have been run, since a power emergency kept the reactor running too long, this allowed what is termed burnable poisons to accumulate. To get the power needed, they pulled control rods. This caused a Wigner Release of energy from the graphite causing a fire which melted the water filled tubes in the reactor to melt, causing a steam explosion which shredded to reactor and destroyed parts of the reactor building roof (the reactor had no containment, only a building to shield it from weather. The ultimate blame should be shared by several elements of the Soviet government (still in power then). First: the reactor type was an overgrown weapons reactor which allowed fuel rods to be removed for processing, why there was no containment. Second: The danger of this type of reactor was shown by the British Windscale Reactor fire which caused exposure into Northern Europe. This was a planned Wigner Release and they found their weren't enough thermo couples to determine heat. I am not sure if there were adequate thermocouples at Chernobyl or if they were ignored. Third: two different Soviet bureaucracies were involved. Since Chernobyl was a power generating reactor, they were told to keep running after they were to shutdown; meanwhile the nuclear safety people wanted to run a test to see if the reactor could safely shutdown in a particular condition. If shutdown on schedule, the burnable poisons wouldn't have been an issue. However the operators were left in the middle. They had to please both, so they kept running and tried to pull rods to keep the power up for the test. Result disaster. In the US, the test would have been cancelled; in the Soviet Union, the two agencies were equal and the operators had to please both because either could harm their careers.
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I am surprised that the autopsy was available for this program. When we were trained, this material was heavily controlled. By the way, bodies were buried by the families, they were lead lined caskets; and this was after decontamination. Remember how, the autopsies were done. Anything too radioactive was treated as nuclear waste and and not returned to the family, which was why the autopsy report was heavily controlled.
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Despite people's behavior issues, there were other issues. I am happy to see actual comments about the design problems and maintenance issues. What happened wasn't an nuclear explosion; rather a steam explosion. The reactor type was modified and several were finished and possibly deployed. We were trained on this for a military emergency planning job.
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@tomriedinger6675 The reason for my doubt it was the operators, were the industry reports that I read. My job was training on corporate response procedures, so I saw the material as it came into the company. I never saw a final conclusion about who cut the water.
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No meltdown. A steam explosion isn't a meltdown, and no matter what the men did, the design flaws were the problem. As a result, there was a disaster. Each control rod was worth too much and had a problem with binding in its channel.
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Most of the deaths only involved the tsunami. Few if any lives were lost from the reactor. Many areas have already been returned to use. The ghosts are people like this who use horrible events for their own purpose.
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@danadurnfordkevinblanchdebunk i agree that no immediate radiation deaths occurred either in the general public public or w9rkers. I don't know if any long term issues applied to workers since I have no info on their degree of exposure; although nothing I have heard would indicate injury due to the actual exposure. Long term issues will take decades to see and what degree they may exceed normal rates of death. The goal is to keep risk within the normal death rates for an unexpected population, remember there is a plus or minus number involved in that. Not dealing with radiation, just the idea, the death rate for an unexposed populations will vary, a number of deaths exceeding that normal variance may be statistically important if a single cause can be determined.
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Human errors, the greatest was the shutting off of the emergency water to the core. The last I have heard no one ever admitted to turning it off. US uses that containment building. Most of the radioactive material plated out in the containment. The actual radiation level at the site boundary was no more than a worker would have get in a year working in the plant. According to some sources 60% of the core was damaged; compare to Chernobyl that was claimed to of only damaged 15%, but released enough radiation to be seen around the world. Why the difference? The Soviet plant had no containment, only a weather shield. It was a carbon graphite reactor which was arranged to allow rods to be removed during operations to obtain plutonium. There is a great deal more in differences; but we can go there some other time.
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The issue was that the previous worker failed to purge the tank at the close of his shift and this man failed to check that the tank was empty. Two careless workers at lax instructions. By the way, the comment about nervous system death is valid.
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