I have a question about nuclear weapons. Anyone here know much about them?

[PamW]

93. Xenon Instability plus a trigger...

First, they were NOT attempting to return to full power.

They were running a previously scheduled experiment. They wanted to answer the question if the residual steam in the system could provide shutdown cooling if they had a loss of coolant accident.

So they triggered a loss of coolant accident by shutting down the pumps. They had ZERO intention to return to power. They wanted to see if they could shutdown without the use of the stand-by diesels. It's what many asked if Fukushima could have done.

The reactor was in an unstable state due to its normal instability in being over-moderated. That normal instability was "augmented" to a very great degree by the Xenon transient. So they had a very unstable reactor. However, having instability isn't enough to have the problem. You need to "seed" the instability.

That's what cutting off the coolant did. The higher temperature due to coolant loss caused higher power due to positive temperature coefficient. The power rise fed into the Xenon instability - and away you go.

http://www.energybandgap.com/power-generation/chernobyl-nuclear-disaster/

What were the causes of the Chernobyl Disaster? The accident happened during an experiment to improve the safety and security of the nuclear reactor. The two primary explanations are testing the limits of the reactor design, and blaming the operators for making mistakes and violating safety rules.


It was operator error in conducting an experiment under conditions that the experiment was not planned for.

But mechanistically; the triggering event WAS coolant loss.

PamW