Imagine living in a town of thirteen thousand people and being a part of an event so historic and so dangerous from the 1980's that is still being felt until today, that displaced more than one hundred and fifteen thousand people were displaced from their homes and never allowed back to the places that they've could have lived in for multiple generations. Well, that's what the people of Chernobyl, part of the old Soviet Union that is now known as Ukraine, and other surrounding areas had to go through as a result of a terrible nuclear explosion in April of 1986. Accoring to Greenpeace.org the events that led up to the failure of the 4th reactor at Chernobyl was:.
"The operating crew was planning to test whether the turbines could produce sufficient energy to keep the coolant pumps running in the event of a loss of power until the emergency diesel generator was activated. To prevent any interruptions to the power of the reactor, the safety systems were deliberately switched off. To conduct the test, the reactor had to be powered down to 25 percent of its capacity. This procedure did not go according to plan and the reactor power level fell to less than 1 percent. The power therefore had to be slowly increased. But 30 seconds after the start of the test, there was an unexpected power surge. The reactor's emergency shutdown (which should have halted a chain reaction) failed." .
The causes of this horrific nuclear explosion and the subsequent results to the explosion are said to be, politics, design errors, and human/crew errors during the reactors failure. The design and political causes go hand in hand and the political problems may have caused the design errors. The stemming effects from what happened at Chernobyl are, people being displaced from their homes, thyroid cancer, and deaths. However, the most drastic depressing effect of the reactor failure is probably the resulting health problems in humans, animals, and the offspring of both.
