A far more serious accident occurred seven years later at Chernobyl, in what was then still the Soviet Union. At the time of the accident--April 26, 1986--the Chernobyl nuclear power station consisted of four operating 1,000-megawatt power reactors sited along the banks of the Pripyat River, about sixty miles north of Kiev in the Ukraine, the fertile grain-producing region of the southwestern USSR. A fifth reactor was under construction.
All the Chernobyl reactors were of a design that the Russians call the RBMK--natural uranium-fueled, water-cooled, graphite-moderated--a design that American physicist and Nobel laureate Hans Bethe has called "fundamentally faulty, having a built-in instability." Because of the instability, an RBMK reactor that loses its coolant can under certain circumstances increase in reactivity and run progressively faster and hotter rather than shut itself down. Nor were the Chernobyl reactors protected by containment structures like those required for U.S. reactors, though they were shielded with heavy concrete covers.
Without question, the accident at Chernobyl was the result of a fatal combination of ignorance and complacency. "As members of a select scientific panel convened immediately after the...accident," writes Bethe, "my colleagues and I established that the Chernobyl disaster tells us about the deficiencies of the Soviet political and administrative system rather than about problems with nuclear power."
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