This was one of the reasons for the reactor explosion during the Chernobyl accident. Safety measures were ignored, the uranium fuel in the reactor overheated and melted through the These RBMK reactors, as the Soviets designate them, currently produce about half of the Soviet Union’s electricity from nuclear power and 5% of its total generating capacity. Two workers died within hours of the reactor explosion from non-radiological causes. We take a look at some of the details of the catastrophe. Chernobyl remains the worst nuclear accident in global history in terms of lives lost and overall cost since it happened on April 26, 1986. Yes, it was obviously an accident. On April 26, 1986, the Number Four RBMK reactor at the nuclear power plant at Chernobyl, Ukraine, went out of control during a test at low-power, leading to an explosion and fire that demolished the reactor building and released large amounts of radiation into the atmosphere. Reactor poisoning, withdrawn control rods, positive void coefficient Lots of fancy words, let me try to break it down, Barney-style (*). It's highly dubious that the Chernobyl corium, without it's graphite and contaminated by concrete, steel, and especially Boron (a potent neutron absorber), could have even assembled into a critical mass at all. The Chernobyl accident's severe radiation effects killed 28 of the site's 600 workers in the first four months after the event. However, the RBMK reactor used had a positive coefficient, which means that the reactor becomes very unstable at low power levels, and vulnerable to dangerous rises in energy production levels. The Chernobyl Power Complex, lying about 130 km north of Kiev, Ukraine, and about 20 km south of the border with Belarus (Figure 1), consisted of four nuclear reactors of the RBMK-1000 design, Units 1 and 2 being constructed between 1970 and 1977, while Units 3 and 4 … Why they haven't taken precaustions beforehand? Another 106 workers received high enough doses to cause acute radiation sickness. Another cause was a flaw in the design of control rods. But a steam explosion is nowhere near the megaton-scale energy release described in the show. Was explosion of RBMK reactor in Chernobyl an accident? The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear disaster which occurred on 26 April 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Pripyat, Ukraine.At that time, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union..