The worker at Chernobyl reactor 4 were performing a test to see if the turbines could provide enough

energy to keep the coolant pumps running if there was a loss of power, and if they could keep them
running until the emergency diesel generator kicked in. They’d done this test before, but the tests had
been unsuccessful. They turned down the reactor to 25 percent of its capacity, but a problem arose
when the power plummeted to one percent. They then tried to increase the power, but what ensued
was a massive power surge. The reactor’s emergency shutdown failed. One engineer had wanted to
abort the test but was told by a senior to carry on. The reactor then became even more unstable. This
caused considerable pressure, and according to one step-by-step report one engineer witnessed, “ the
1.5 ton (350 kg) blocks atop the fuel channels of the Upper Biological Shield began jumping up and down
and you could feel the shock waves through the building structure.” What did he do then? Of course, he
ran for it, down a series of steps to report what he had seen to others. The pumps failed, there was no
water flow, and the reactor started to make loud noises. As another website tells us about the sudden
increase in power, “ A peculiarity of the design of the control rods caused a dramatic surge as they were
inserted into the reactor.“ Hot fuel combined with cool water, created a mass of steam that couldn’t
escape and caused lots of pressure. This lifted a 1000-ton lid and here we have the start of the radiation
leak. Air got into the reactor and caused a graphite fire. A second explosion happened when hydrogen
was formed by hot water steam contacting zirconium. This was a much bigger explosion than the first,
and it threw debris everywhere. Powe went out, except for battery-powered lighting. The air was filled
with dust One man died, and his body was encased in all debris. Burning fuels started fires everywhere
and radiation was cast into the atmosphere. All the internal phone lines went down, and workers fled
from the scene. Firefighters arrived, apparently unaware of the danger they were in due to the radiation
leak. One even joke about it saying, “ There must be an incredible amount of radiation here. We’ll be
lucky if we’re all still alive in the morning.” He was kidding, but he wasn’t far off. As one woman
explained, the next day she found out there had been a fire, but the kids still played, the went to school,
people still milled around in the street, even though she said, “ All the roads were covered in water and
some white liquid. Everything was white, foamy.” She added that she wasn’t told about the radiation,
stating, “About radiation, the radioactivity was escaping, there was not a word.”The rator was filled with
water, but then flooding was a problem. After that, for days, thousand of tons of clay, sand , boron, and
dolomite, were dropped by helicopter into the burning reactor to quell the fire, but also to try and
prevent the spread of radiation. For 10 days, a large amount of radioactive substances pervaded the air,
most of it falling as dust into nearby areas, but smaller particles spread far and wide carried by the
wind.
The Soviet Union invested heavily in nuclear power after world war II and the VI Lenel Nuclear power
station 10 miles to the north of Chernobyl had become operational in 1977 there were four RBMK
nuclear reactors at the site each capable of producing 1000 megawatts of electric power. On the night of
25th of April 1986 sleep-deprived plant workers ran a series of tests on reactor for during a period of
routine maintenance they wanted to see whether the reactor could still be cooled if the plant was lost
power, but they violated safety protocols and several power surges occurred inside the reactor it lead to
chain reaction of explosions powerful enough to blow off the steel and concrete lid with reactors core
exposed radioactive material spewed into the atmosphere. Official reports claimed that to plant workers
died in the initial explosion but some estimates put the number closer to 50 dozen of firefighters called
in to extinguish the flames were also hospitalized with radiation sickness. With the cold war still going on
the Soviet Union did all it could to avoid the disaster gaining international attention. It was 36 hrs until
orders were issued for the neighboring town of Pripyat built for plant workers in 1970 to be evacuated
by the time airborne radioactivity was being picked up at Swedish monitoring stations the Soviets could
no longer sustain secrecy around the event they made a brief announcement on April 28 th and an outcry
over the dangers posed by radioactive emissions began in many Western European countries to contain
the fire blazing in the exposed core sand boron clay and lead were dropped onto the flames