this might be a little off-topic, but I don’t know where else to ask
i saw a video simulating the real time unfolding of the chernobyl disaster and it blew my mind how much the engineers ignored every warning and security measure possible
(yt link for those interested: https://youtu.be/WMr3-ShzB08)
why would they do this? i’m not a nuclear engineer, but i’d much rather risk my job, my career and leave millions of people without electricity than push the safety thresholds even by the tiniest bit. trying to look for explanations online leads to liberal, anticommunist bullshit like “russian incompetence” or “they wouldn’t dare question the generals” or whatever. i want an actual, technical (and social) explanation without any liberal bias, which is why i’m asking it here
The AZ-5 system doesn’t cause significant power excursions in most cases
The reason it did on the night of April 26th is because the operators had negligently removed so many control rods completely from the core that the graphite tips of the removed control rods were able to displace water in the core upon being reinserted and make the already extremely dangerous power excursion situation even worse
There are still many RBMKs operating safely in the world and I think they have an undeservedly bad reputation, but yeah, they should be shut down and replaced lol. They lack many modern safety features, the worst omission being the lack of an outer reactor containment building (which may have prevented the disaster from being so bad). The design is impressive for the time and place where they were developed but yeh