I reattori di Chernobyl potrebbero essere cambiati tra la fissione dell’uranio per scopi civili e l’arricchimento del plutonio per quelli militari. Per facilitare la commutazione dei gruppi di carburante, la parte superiore dei reattori era leggermente coperta. Ecco perché le radiazioni si sono diffuse così lontano dopo il crollo
https://www.newsweek.com/hunt-russian-woodpecker-246670
di HydrolicKrane
13 commenti
Let me guess, this was also a cost cutting measure?
“If anything, the military purpose of Chernobyl-2 (Woodpecker’s closed zone) is a reminder that the purpose of the Chernobyl power station was never entirely civilian, either. While it did provide vast amounts of electricity to Ukraine, its four reactors were of the RBMK variety (graphite-moderated nuclear High Power Channel-type Reactor), meaning they could be easily switched between the fission of uranium for civilian purposes and the enrichment of plutonium for military ones. That left the top of reactor lightly covered, in order to make the switching of fuel assemblies easier. That’s why, when the thing unleashed its fiery belch one April day, a good part of Europe got a dusting of radionuclides…”
Not terrible not great
How is this news in 2025?
Emmm… no?
The capability to reload fuel from the top without stopping the reactor had little to do with civil vs military use of reactor. It was done to increase to the maximum the capacity factor of the reactor *while in civil purpose use* – to produce electricity for as long as possible without stopping it.
That’s incorrect, rbmk reactor requires quite often circulation of fuel rods, in any mod of operation.
Above the reactor body there is auto loader system that hold roughly x5 of reactor fuel load.rotation/replacement done hot, without reactor stop.
Rbmk reactors was/is not bad or primitive or something like this, in some aspect they are more advanced than widely used light water reactors.They just where rushed to production too early, without fixing all “freshmen issues”
> If anything, the military purpose of Chernobyl 2 is a reminder that the purpose of the Chernobyl power station was never entirely civilian, either. While it did provide vast amounts of electricity to Ukraine, its four reactors were of the RBMK variety, meaning they could be easily switched between the fission of uranium for civilian purposes and the enrichment of plutonium for military ones. That left the top of reactor lightly covered, in order to make the switching of fuel assemblies easier. That’s why, when the thing unleashed its fiery belch one April day, a good part of Europe got a dusting of radionuclides.
No, the option to have fuel be loaded from the top has nothing to do with civilian or military uses.
It has everything to do with cost-cutting measures and having a better output for its size.
RBMKs were just poorly designed from a safety standpoint, that’s all there is to it. Not only they have a reversed functional principle compared to current, safer, nuclear reactors, but they also lack many safety features most nuclear reactor have.
I’d disagree that, all other things equal, a version of RBMK that didn’t offer fuel replenishment during operation would have resulted in less contamination. The primary reason the Soviets went with RBMK over proposed PWR designs is that it could be cheaply manufactured in factories that were common in the USSR, as opposed to requiring a pressure vessel that would have taxed their limited very large forging facilities.
Building a 1GWe PWR pressure vessel would have been an unimaginable (albeit theoretically possibe) undertaking for their industry of the time while RBMK could be assembled like a building; there’s a video floating round of them assembling one of the cores where they’re stacking graphite like house bricks. The core also wildly fluctuated in power states across its volume, further complicating maintaining control of a reactor which was capable of running out of control under the best circumstances.
In my view, given how active the graphite is post-shutdown, they’d still have had the same refuelling design and, even in an RBMK that needs full disassembly for refuelling, it would have lacked sufficient containment to hold back the prompt criticality that occurred.
I’d suggest Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl as a good starting point for understanding the accident.
Newsweek is garbage and it’s posted all over reddit…
Welp, any reactor can do that, that’s the point of reactors, they make things react, also what does OP wants to say with it?
The fact that Harry Seldon was involved in the design of the reactors and they hid crucial design flaws from his Plan is mind-boggling.
Published 2014
When you are in [the middle of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone](https://www.newsweek.com/2014/04/25/tourism-construction-and-ongoing-nuclear-crisis-chernobyl-248163.html), and your tour guide asks, with just a hint of guile, if you would like to see the Russian Woodpecker, you might think that you will finally be afforded a glimpse of one of the area’s fabled mutants, an irradiated avian with a beak the size of Finland.
You assent. Yes, let’s go see the Russian Woodpecker! How much more strange can things get, really? You then start driving into the woods, on a narrow lane that was once a road: everything in Chernobyl was once something, and something else. A deer skipped along our path. The dosimeter clicked like a summer insect. As Marlow says in *Heart of Darkness*, “We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance.”
There it was, finally, past a guard station and down a lane occluded by weeds: the Russian Woodpecker, the Steel Yard, the Duga-3, a metal mesh that seems to have risen from the Earth intact. Once, it drove Western radio operators mad with its insistent clicks. Now it is inert, silent, useless, a stuffed bird in a glass case. Look at it all you want. Climb it, even, but keep in mind that that’s Soviet steel under your feet.
The entirety of what’s known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is a sort of *matryushka* nesting doll encompassing 1,000 square miles. There is the outer 30 km ring, followed by the 10 km ring surrounding the nuclear power plant itself, followed by the infamous Reactor No. 4, the tenebrous innermost doll that few people have entered since the fatal morning of April 26, 1986. Chernobyl 2 is one of the more mysterious patches in this of picked-over graveyard of forgotten villages, abandoned apartment blocks and radioactive forests.
Once a toxic zone rife with radiation, Chernobyl is today a toxic zone rife with radiation and tourists. Of all the things to see here, Chernobyl 2 is the newest and maybe even the strangest, a superlative not easily earned among Chernobyl’s innumerable wonders.
Because the radar was used to gather military intelligence, Chernobyl 2 remained closed to visitors long after the Exclusion Zone opened up to tourism in 2002. That only made the place more alluring. In 2011, a presenter for the Kremlin-sponsored channel RT claimed that he had exclusive access to Chernobyl 2. He then ducked through a gap in the fence. The following year, a video appeared on YouTube showing Ukrainian and/or Russian daredevils BASE jumping off the top of the radar installation, which is almost 50 stories high. To do so, they had to spend an entire day hiking some 20 miles through the Exclusion Zone, at one point fording a river in a frighteningly flimsy life raft. “This is the most beautiful man-made object from which we’ve jumped,” one of them declares before plummeting to the ground.
Finally relenting last fall, the Ukrainian administrators of Chernobyl now permit tourists to view what’s formally known as the Duga-3 over-the-horizon backscatter radar installation, which went silent in 1989, rendered useless by a concluding Cold War whose victors would need no nukes for a *coup de grâce*. From a roof in Pripyat (the company town where Chernobyl’s workers lived), the Russian Woodpecker is visible in the distance rising well above the tree line, a sight infinitely more intriguing than the low buildings of the power plant. It looks like the last remnant of a ruined battlement, a now-porous wall that once held Mongols at bay.