this might be a little off-topic, but I don’t know where else to ask
i saw a video simulating the real time unfolding of the chernobyl disaster and it blew my mind how much the engineers ignored every warning and security measure possible
(yt link for those interested: https://youtu.be/WMr3-ShzB08)
why would they do this? i’m not a nuclear engineer, but i’d much rather risk my job, my career and leave millions of people without electricity than push the safety thresholds even by the tiniest bit. trying to look for explanations online leads to liberal, anticommunist bullshit like “russian incompetence” or “they wouldn’t dare question the generals” or whatever. i want an actual, technical (and social) explanation without any liberal bias, which is why i’m asking it here
They were running tests, so some warnings were expected.
Accidents are kinda inevitable with new technologies, especially nuclear. The US actually had its main nuclear accident, Three Mile Island, in 1979, which was quite a bit earlier than the USSR’s Chernobyl in 1986. The human errors that caused both accidents were quite similar, the US just had a slightly better reactor design that prevented the same steam blowout that Chernobyl suffered.
Because of the backdrop of the Cold War, the US didn’t share anything it learned from its mistakes at Three Mile Island with the Soviet Union.
Notice that after their respective disasters, the USA and USSR/Russia have not had similar meltdowns again. Since the end of the Cold War, no accidents have been caused again by similar issues due to the sharing of reactor info.
The Fukushima meltdown was due to corporate incompetence and skimping on disaster preparedness by TEPCO, so isn’t comparable.
