Engineering Disasters: The Chernobyl Reactor Incident
With engineering being a necessity in today's society, the creation of buildings, bridges and many other marvels is required to live. However with the creation of these structures, not everything can turn out to be a happy ending and sometimes even causes major crisis for humanity's. While many techniques or practices are used in order to avoid these major catastrophes such as the use of stronger and higher quality materials or the use of computer to calculate outside factors, this will continue to grow and allow for society to build structures not only safely, but efficiently in order to allow for these structures to last for years. Unfortunately these techniques cannot ensure hundred percent of our safety due to there always being unknown factors at work such as mistakes made by people during construction or the laziness of making adjustments in order to fulfill the task at hand. Due to reasons such as these, major accidents have occured over the years whether it be with bridges or with power plants. Bridges such as the Quebec Bridge which are now present today have had made history in which they display the much more dangerous side of the engineering career with the Quebec Bridge not only collapsing once, but twice. This shows how important an engineers job is due to them juggling the live of the civilians who use their creations when their work is done. This is shown specifically through the incident of the nuclear power plant in the city of Chernobyl located in modern day Ukraine. This incident was one of the most catastrophic engineering events that has probably occurred for the engineering society. This event occurred due to the stupidity of the engineers because of their greed and them trying to take shortcuts to minimize the work amount. The Chernobyl reactor incident occurred in modern day Ukraine on the twenty sixth of april in 1986 when Russia was formerly known as the USSR.
The background behind this incident was that during the safety testing of the Chernobyl reactor, the head engineering chief took many dangerous risks and was the main cause of this incident. Due to his reckless actions, many dangerous events unfolded and is what caused one of the worlds biggest nuclear accidents. One of the main reasons why this event occurred was the attempt to not only do the safety test early, but also during a time when the reactor was in an unstable condition. While the head chief had decided to do the test earlier to eliminate the reason to do the test later, he was violating protocol of doing scheduled test during the date required and even if the incident of the chernobyl reactor hadn’t occurred, he would be in great trouble for not following protocol. Furthermore, the head chief didn’t allow for the reactor to reach a certain amount of gigawatt to be able to do the protocol and instead went significantly under the required amount. This is against violations in a major way because of how nuclear energy is not only very dangerous, but also because of how many lives are at stake in case anything goes wrong. Other violations that lead to this reactors demise is to continue the test with not only low gigawatt, but also with an incompatible amount of water to help cool down the system. Factors such as these were some minor reasons on how violations had occurred during the testing of the Chernobyl power plants reactor.
One major thing that could have stopped the incident of the Chernobyl reactor explosion was the other engineers located in the room when conducting the safety test of the reactor. With many engineers, this incident could have been stopped with simply going against the chief engineer and following protocol or training that was given to them. If this initiative was taken, then the result of the reactor exploding could have been avoided. While the engineers could have done these actions, they were avoided due to them not willing to lose their high paying job and as well as them calculating the probability of the reactor exploding or worse was relatively low and decided it was best that they don't speak. In the end, we see that isn’t the case and them not saying anything has lead to something much worse. Since this event has occurred, engineering societies such as the Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) have established guidelines to prevent fear of losing a job or having a bad reputation by not telling the society in case another engineer is practicing foulfull tactics or not following guideline of the PEO. This rule is strict in order to avoid incidents such as these by even threatening the job of the engineer who see other engineers not following guidelines and continues to avoid telling the engineering society. With rules such as these in place, major incidents such as the Chernobyl reactor explosion could be avoided and even helps the engineering society to keep engineers who follow good ethical practices.
Another major reason on why the Chernobyl reactor exploded is due to the construction of the power plant ot mechanical errors. The very first error could be the deficiency or cooling water in the reactor. While this isn’t much of a construction error, but more of the error of the engineers not doing much to fix the problem, this was a main cause of the reactors explosion. Without much water to be able to cool down the reactor, the reactor ending up exploding and allowed for radiation to spread. If this problem had been fixed even by delaying the safety test, the explosion probably could have been avoided and damage could have been to a minimum. While this wasn’t the case, water wasn’t able to cool down the already unstable reactor. The other main part of explosion was the reactor itself, mainly the roof. While the reactor was properly built to be functional, the roof wasn’t taken into much consideration and didn’t have much thought put into it. Due to the reactor becoming unstable, the units on the roof of the reactor had started to move caused by the steam of the reactor and was what ended up causing the explosion. If the roof had been made to withstand the steam from the reactor and was reinforced even more, the reactor would have been able to stabilize overtime and be cooled down slowly by the water. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case and is what ended up causing such a catastrophic event. Since the roof was unfortified, this allowed for the radiation in the spread into the city of Chernobyl. Since the accident that had occured, many terrible things had followed. About thirty people were killed due to either the actual explosion or the radiation that had leaked out from the reactor and more than one hundred thousand people had to be evacuated out of the city in order to stop any further deaths from radiation. While some of the engineers in the control room had survived, while most engineers who were working on the reactor had died. Firefighter had also come to stop fire and help evacuate citizens.
Radiation was a main event that occured after the explosion due to the large quantity of it being released into the world affecting neighboring countries. While measure have been made to help decrease this by making a cover over the old power plant to help contain the radiation, the events that have occurred due this explosion cannot be undone. Other effect of this event could be the death of firefighters who had nothing to do with the event and suffered because of it. While a memorial was created in honor of those who helped to evacuate the citizens, the deaths of those firefighter can not be replaced and this is severely true for their families. This incident has made a significant impact to not only the engineering society, but also to the rest of the world. We can see how much of an impact this catastrophe has left the world to be scared of engineers even more than they should as they now have to lookout for any flaws or think about their own safety when crossing simple local bridges also made by engineers. Although this incident has left many deep wounds in the engineering society, it is a great example to show other engineers in order to further ethical techniques when doing work in this career.
Through this event, societies have formed such as the PEO in order to puch ethical techniques and even to help show how shortcuts should be avoided and this event shows that in every way. This is shown through the shortcuts and stupidity of the chief engineer and the shortcomings of the engineers surrounding him. Furthermore, we see how we should avoid being risky and make things more dangerous in order to save funds instead of people with examples such as the roof of the reactor or the deficiency of the water to cool down the reactor. We can further see this in examples such as the Quebec Bridge, in order to bring down costs and make the job easier, shortcuts were used in order to finish the job quickly, but also save money.
With the many different disasters that have occured, the Chernobyl reactor explosion was by far the worst as it allowed for the world to see how different things must be done in order to make things not only safer, but also in order to work for years down the line in order to ensure safety in the future.
