A little light reading
Last night, through a path that actually made some sort of sense at the time, I found myself on the Wikipedia entry for the Chernobyl disaster. I can't vouch for the factual accuracy of the page, but it passes the sniff test. I found it an utterly fascinating read-- the chain of fuckups that produced this catastrophe is truly stunning.
The timing of it is one of the most fascinating things to me:
"At 1:23:04 a.m. the experiment began."
"With reactor output rapidly increasing, the operators pressed the AZ-5 ("Rapid Emergency Defense 5") button at 1:23:40"
"At 1:24, 20 seconds after the SCRAM was ordered, the first steam explosion took place"
"A second, more powerful explosion occurred about two or three seconds after the first:"
That's like one minute of elapsed time between them starting the experiment and having the biggest nuclear incident in history. Wow.
The timing of it is one of the most fascinating things to me:
"At 1:23:04 a.m. the experiment began."
"With reactor output rapidly increasing, the operators pressed the AZ-5 ("Rapid Emergency Defense 5") button at 1:23:40"
"At 1:24, 20 seconds after the SCRAM was ordered, the first steam explosion took place"
"A second, more powerful explosion occurred about two or three seconds after the first:"
That's like one minute of elapsed time between them starting the experiment and having the biggest nuclear incident in history. Wow.
