Photo of the New Safe Confinement at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant which covers the number 4 reactor unit, on the 36th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear disaster. (SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images) CHERNOBYL, Ukraine - Here in the dirt of one of the world’s most radioactive...
Nuclear reactor at Chernobyl will be closed.KIEV - President Clinton and Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma announced yesterday that the last nuclear reactor operating at Chernobyl, site of the world's worst radiation disaster, will close forever on Dec. 15.Cain, Andrew...
What Can Go Wrong With a Nuclear Reactor? A diagram of radiation contamination after the Chernobyl disaster. HowStuffWorks With government regulators looking over their shoulders, engineers have spent a lot of time over the years designing reactors for optimal safety -- not just so they work proper...
December 15, 2000: Unit 3, the last working reactor at Chernobyl, is shut down. Units 1 and 2 had been shut down in 1996 and 1991, respectively. April 2006: Gorbachev writes that the Chernobyl disaster, “even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the colla...
Chernobyl dogs living outside the New Safe Confinement Structure, which was built to contain radioactivity from the explosion of reactor four. Tim Mousseau via NHGRI Although exposure to ionizing radiation is known to elevate genetic mutation rates across various plant and animal species, ...
A melted amalgam of nuclear fuel at Chernobyl is beginning to react. The issue is rainwater, which has activated materials buried deep within the closed plant. The reaction could burn out naturally, but it could also require human intervention. On April 26, 1986, Reactor No. 4 exploded at ...
This article explores the causes (and aftermath) of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster that occurred near Pripyat, Ukraine. What prompted reactor 3 to fail? Could the disaster have been avoided altogether?
The Causes of the Disaster On April 25, 1986, reactor four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant was shut down for routine maintenance. Management decided to conduct tests while it was shut down. One such test was to see if the turbines could still cool the reactor's core if power were ...
Unbelievably, the events of the Chernobyl disaster could have been even worse if not for real-life hero Aleksandr Akimov and his brave team. Akimov was the first to declare an emergency in the plant as soon as the reactor was shut down, though by then the damage had already been done....
A European-funded project is racing to complete a vast steel containment building covering the entire Chernobyl reactor number four. The original concrete and steel sarcophagus covering the melted down reactor is becoming unstable. The new arch, designed to be slid into place, is tall enough to ...