Chernobyl, Déjà vu 25 Years Later

Paul Richardson 2011

Photo: Shone/Gamma/Getty Images

AFTER THE EXPLOSION: Three days following the start of the world's
worst nuclear disaster, the Chernobyl power station was in ruins.

The major lessons of Chernobyl, the 1979 Three Mile Island disaster before
it, and very likely that of the Fukushima disaster—is that Murphy’s Law still
prevails. That law states that whatever can go wrong will go wrong.
O’Leary’s corollary to Murphy’s is that Murphy was an optimist. Judging
that something is highly unlikely and need not be actively prevented by
design is the fatal flaw that leads to disasters like this. Yes, addressing all
of those contingencies makes the initial design more expensive but when
compared to the cost of the Fukushima and its predecessor disasters is tiny
to the point of triviality.

At Chernobyl the graphite-moderated reactor there had a design defect: At

certain power levels, if there was a loss of coolant, the reactivity of the plant
would escalate sharply. Plus, the inner containment structure of the reactor,
as opposed to the standard a steel pressure vessel used elsewhere, was
basically a box whose lid was poorly attached. The fuel and control rods
penetrated that lid, so when a sudden increase in pressure occurred, the lid
would rupture breaking all of the rods.

How Soviet engineers could have designed a reactor with such defects is
unbelievable. That couples with the operators deliberately putting the
reactor into exactly the dangerous state that would cause the increased
pressure. No one appears to have given the possibility
that everything could go badly wrong all at once any credence. Following
is an excerpt from an IEEE article by William Sweet, April 2011.

”Focusing on individual components” in risk analysis can be

profoundly misleading, as the Princeton University researcher M.V.
Ramana pointed out in a recent commentary. The seductive but
misleading reasoning was that ”a severe accident [couldn’t] happen
unless multiple safety systems [failed] simultaneously,” and that
”therefore, a severe accident is exceedingly unlikely.”

The recent Fukushima disaster in Japan once again brought home

the real risk of common-cause failures: A single event led to ”the loss
of off-site electrical power to the reactor complex, the loss of oil tanks
and replacement fuel for diesel generators, the flooding of the
electrical switchyard, and perhaps damage to the inlets that brought
in cooling water from the ocean,” as Ramana enumerates.
”Fukushima also demonstrated one of the perverse impacts of using
multiple systems to ensure greater levels of safety: Redundancy can
sometimes make things worse.”
Another outcome of Chernobyl, now to be tragically repeated at
Fukushima: Long term, the invisible results of the accident will be
even worse than the visible ones. It will take decades to restore the
immediate physical environment of the Fukushima plants—an
exercise that has not gone well in the region around Chernobyl.
Meanwhile, there will be an ongoing death toll over the years from
radiation-induced cancers. But these victims will be unidentifiable, not
only because it will be impossible to determine if a particular cancer is
caused by radiation from Fukushima or by something else, but
because the total expected increases in cancer and cancer death
rates will be undectable among the extremely large numbers of
cancers that will occur in any case.