In what is now a cold barren wasteland, lays the abandoned city of Pripyat and the lifeless Red Forest. Its silence is a deafening reminder of the tragic events of April 26, 1986. Lives were shattered and perceptions were changed forever. What was scheduled as a safety test ended up spiralling out of control, resulting in the destruction of one of the plants reactors, the death of 56 persons, the decimation of thousands of miles of land, and radiation effects on hundreds of thousands of people; effects that would carry on for generations. Public opinion, which may have been sceptic towards Nuclear Power before this event, then rallied against it in the aftermath of Chernobyl. Soviet authorities did their best to keep the situation quiet, but when this was no longer sustainable, the accident was blamed wholly on human error during the tests. However, as time passed and the era of Soviet rule came to an end, further information has been made available. The evidence now shows that the tragedy was caused by a combination of factors, all which ominously aligned on that fateful day of 26th April.
[...] The Hypothesis is that a better organizational design could have prevented the Chernobyl disaster. Nevertheless, the Chernobyl case is more in favour of the NAT and provides an example of the incalculable risk of the interplay of technology and human behaviour. Why and how far will be shown in the following chapters. Field level analysis In the post WWII era, the world ran on a bilateral fight for world hegemony. Opposed to the U.S./Western political, economic, social and technologic super power based on a capitalist model and a market economy, the Communist model strived to rise up its philosophy and extend its scope of influence to the world. [...]
[...] Redundancies and alternative paths and substitutions of elements of the system, be it human or material, can be undertaken. Systems or organizations become tighter through more hierarchical communication, cost cuttings or less redundant components of the systems. The Chernobyl reactor can be described as a complex, tightly coupled system. For example, the hierarchy in this soviet culture based organization was very strong. Orders from the top had to be strictly carried out at the bottom, which made this structure very tightly coupled. [...]
[...] Engineers became concerned by the eventual system instability and decided to raise the rods in order to increase the output, which was at 30MWt. 01:00 on April The output was increasing and reached Therefore, as the bbc.co.uk (2006) states more rods were raised. The automatic shutdown system was disabled in order to keep the reactor working under such low power conditions. The engineers continued raising the rods. 01:23 on April Power level reached 12% or 200MWt. Engineers began the test. The power levels suddenly scales up to dangerous levels just moments later. [...]
[...] One is stress. As the test was going awry, the tension within the plant was also rising. The lack of understanding and general lack of information concerning the test fed into the people's fear, this coupled by them complying anyway (as explained previously) due to the fear of consequences, meant fear adding on fear. This of course is then translated into further stress. Once this stress hit its peak, as we saw in the analysis, people go back to their basics, which in this case meant the hasty insertion of the control rods, then ironically produced the meltdown. [...]
[...] The control rods themselves, even though made mostly of Boron, had Graphite tips. This meant that when inserted, they would initially spark an increase in fission for a few seconds and then shut the process down (Medvedev, 1990). Under normal circumstances this effect would not be serious; however, if the Reactor becomes unstable then an additional peak could potentially compromise the system. Unfortunately, the plant workers were not aware of this issue with the control rod tips. In addition to this, the plant also had three backup Diesel generators. [...]
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