Understanding Chernobyl

The book I read to research this post was Cause And Effect: Understanding Chernobyl by Marianne Barisonek which is an excellent book that I read on kindle unlimited. This book is around 100 pages so is a reasonable length. This book covers the causes of the disaster and its aftermath in a lot of detail. Chernobyl happened because an illegal experiment was carried out. They were trying to see how far they could reduce the power produced by reactor 4. To be safe they needed to keep 30 fuel rods inserted in the reactor but this was reduced to just 6. They turned off the water sprinklers by hand which was because they thought the reactor might crack if it over heated and the sprinklers came on. Compressed air blew in to put the fire out but just made it worse. The fuel rods due to the increased heat resulting from the small amount of rods used buckled and when they tried to insert more fuel rods because they had warped it was stuck. There was a fire and initially people like the fire brigade had no protective clothing. The fact there had been a partial meltdown they attempted to hush up. Nuclear power in Russia was classed as defense and was looked after by the communist party and KGB officials. This meant they weren’t always experts in nuclear power and often had there own agenda. There have been other accidents maybe not as serious as Chernobyl but hushed up. One was fairly near the Scandinavian border and for years they couldn’t understand the increased radioactivity of the area. Another was near the city of Minsk. In both these places there was no evacuation and doctors couldn’t even explain to patients they had radiation sickness. It would be deemed a security breach if they did. When they have these kind of accidents people don’t generally die straight away and it is many years later when people start having things like cancer and having disabled babies. In the case of Chernobyl they estimate it will take at least 300 years for the radiation to subside. There is a black market for selling produce from this area to countries where they don’t have stringent standards for checking radioactivity in food. I really enjoyed this book and would undoubtedly recommend it.