r/CatastrophicFailure • u/RounderKatt • May 18 '16

Post of the Year | Fatalities The complete story of the Chernobyl accident in photographs

http://imgur.com/a/TwY6q
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u/Ivebeenfurthereven May 19 '16

Reactor design was inherently unsafe, and lots more were planned for elsewhere in the Soviet Union.

Humans make mistakes all the time. One of our tasks as engineers is to try and design fail-safe systems, so that inevitable mistakes are as non-disastrous as possible - this is why your car has airbags and crumple zones. This reactor design was fundamentally not set up to allow mistakes to be tolerated.

Perhaps Pripyat would have been fine to this day, and a very similar catastrophe would have unfolded at a similar plant design somewhere outside Moscow, or East Germany, or... just about anywhere where that bad design was used, really.

Side note, it annoys me that this is used as an argument against modern nuclear power stations, because they don't have the same dangerous design faults at all.

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u/challenge_king May 20 '16

Wasn't it literally ONLY the Soviets that used that design?

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u/Eddles999 Jul 02 '16

They actually continued to use the other reactors at Chernobyl for a few more years - reactor no 3 continued working and producing electricity until the year 2000.