Nuclear Accidents Trivia

1. Probably the best known disaster involving nuclear power is the one that happened in the Chernobyl plant. The town of Pripyat in the Soviet Union was rendered uninhabitable, but, in which modern country did all this take place?

From Quiz Fifteen Minutes to Meltdown

Answer: Ukraine

On April 26th, 1986, a systems test of the emergency core cooling experienced a massive spike in output. The cooling system had been deemed unacceptably risky before, and this was the fourth test to see if the emergency coolant system could be improved upon - the previous three tests had all been failures. When the energy spike occurred, there was not enough coolant to moderate the reaction and the nuclear fission went out of control. The core had to be ejected and the result was that a more extreme energy spike occurred leading to several explosions. This, in turn, caused a massive fire which ejected tons of radioactive dust into the air, rendering the area largely uninhabitable.

From Quiz A Taste of Armageddon

Answer: Russia

The monitoring system was defective, the tanks were immersed and cooled in water. The waste dried out and exploded with a force of 70 -100 tons of tnt. 250,000 people were radioactively contaminated and surrounding villages had to be evacuated.

From Quiz Nuclear Incidents

Answer: 1960s

In 1961, a B-52 on a training flight caught fire while flying over North Carolina. As a result of the fire, the bomb ejector racks failed, and two unarmed H-bombs fell to earth. Of course they did not detonate, and they were quickly recovered by the US Air Force. Incidentally, one of the recovered bombs had six of the seven firing safeties triggered! Talk about close calls. Thanks to cag1970 for the extra info.

From Quiz Chernobyl: Worst Nuclear Disaster

Answer: an experiment gone wrong

Ironically, the experiment consisted in testing how the power plant would respond in the event of an accident. The operators at the plant wanted to bring down the power output of the reactor to 25%, but over-confidence, poor training and poor knowledge of how a reactor works caused them to overdo it, and they ended up bringing down the power output to 1%. When they then tried to bring it up to 25%, the reactor overheated and exploded. It's been said that the experiment was supposed to be done a few days before April 26th, but a great demand of power in the area prevented from shutting down even one of the reactors. It's also been said that they were under pressure to do the experiment, and that if had they been more calm about it there wouldn't have been such a terrible accident.

From Quiz Nuclear Power Plant Accidents

Answer: Generally, they worked as designed. However, the operators overrode several of these systems and made the accident much worse than it would otherwise have been.

The accident started with a failure in the normal feed water system. The automated auxiliary feed water system came on but a maintenance error had shut a valve blocking the system out. The reactor detected the loss of cooling water and shut the reactor down automatically. When the pressure got too high a pressure relief valve opened but got stuck open. The operators failed to understand that and only hours later figured out why they were losing water and shut a block valve beyond the stuck open pressure relief valve. When the water level got too low the automatic emergency cooling system came on but the operators, not understanding what was happening, shut it down. Later, as pressure continued to fall, they shut down the primary coolant pumps stopping the circulation of any coolant. Without the manual errors by the operators the accident would have been trivial.

From Quiz A Taste of Armageddon

Answer: Fire

A fire occurred in the plutonium production reactor. This caused at least 39 deaths from radioactive contamination. The plant faces Ireland (ROI) directly and its existence is a bone of contention between the two governments, the matter is at present before the European Court of Justice.

From Quiz Nuclear Incidents

Answer: Never happened

Given the accident rate of Soviet nuclear submarines, this was always a concern. Thankfully, it never happened.

From Quiz Chernobyl: Worst Nuclear Disaster

Answer: #4

Among the chemicals that were ejected into the air: 8 tonnes of plutonium, radioactive graphite blocks, caesium and iodine vapors and other radioactive materials - a lethal combination.

From Quiz Nuclear Power Plant Accidents

Answer: The public were not exposed to dangerous levels of radiation from the accident. No discernable health effects occurred.

While the fuel was seriously damaged, the reactor pressure vessel (the big steel tank the nuclear fuel is in) and the surrounding containment building held. Only a small puff of radioactive gas was released early in the accident before the containment system blocked all exit paths. After years of careful study and strong debate, it was concluded that even the worst exposed individuals received only a fraction of the radiation they would get from a year's worth of naturally occurring sources.

From Quiz Fifteen Minutes to Meltdown

Answer: Submarine

K-431 (previously K-31) was a Soviet nuclear-powered submarine attached to their Pacific fleet. It was an Echo II anti-carrier submarine and was equipped with eight P-6 or P-500 antiship cruise missiles. While docked in Vladivostok, K-431 was being refuelled. The refuelling was concluded and the lid for the reactor was replaced, only incorrectly. The lid had to be lifted up and repositioned, however, this time with the reactor control rods attached to it. Because the lid was lifted up too high, this set off a reaction and caused an explosion due to built-up steam. Ten people lost their lives directly due to the explosion, and others suffered radiation poisoning.

From Quiz A Taste of Armageddon

Answer: Mississippi

The water storage space filled to capacity at the Northern States Power Companys reactor. It spilled over and dumped 50,000 gallons of radioactive water into the river seriously affecting the water supply of St. Paul.

From Quiz Nuclear Incidents

Answer: 1980s

The infamous 1986 Chernobyl explosion was a serious wake-up call to the dangers of what could happen if a nuclear facility suffered a major catastrophe.

From Quiz Chernobyl: Worst Nuclear Disaster

Answer: 31

31 persons was the official number of casualties. Most studies that have been done throughout the years disagree on this one. In the following months after the tragedy, 2,000 persons were supposedly killed by the radiation, but this was never confirmed by the Soviet government.

From Quiz Nuclear Power Plant Accidents

Answer: Both the government and the nuclear industry made fundamental changes in how nuclear power was regulated and how plants were operated.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission undertook an exhaustive series of safety studies and formed a considerable body of enhanced regulations. The industry made a wide variety of changes and improvements. Perhaps the most important of these was the development of full scope simulators. It was recognized that many of the problems in the Three Mile Island accident were caused by the operators dealing with a situation they had never seen before. The simulators were developed to greatly improve operator training. As full scale simulations, these exactly duplicated the control room equipment. The operators could be exposed to simulated accidents and practice correct responses.

From Quiz Fifteen Minutes to Meltdown

Answer: Save time

Three Japanese workers at the Tokaimura nuclear plant achieved critical mass on their own by trying to cut corners and to save time in the mixing procedure. They set off a reaction that lasted over 20 hours, and two of the workers lost their lives due to radiation exposure. None of the three workers was properly qualified for the task they were assigned to. Instead of following procedure and producing the nuclear fuel in a dissolution tank, the three Japanese workers mixed the uranium powder in a stainless-steel bucket along with the nitric acid. They also fed more than the allowed amount of this uranyl nitrate solution into the precipitation tank, about seven times the allowed amount, and this achieved critical mass. Oops? You betcha!

From Quiz A Taste of Armageddon

Answer: Tennessee

The accident happened when uranium was released from a top secret power plant.

From Quiz Nuclear Incidents

Answer: Never happened

So far, the French have had good fortune with their nuclear submarine programs. This never happened.

From Quiz Chernobyl: Worst Nuclear Disaster

Answer: 2

Two days after the accident, when radioactivity was monitored at a Swedish station, the Soviet government admitted there had been a fatal accident at Chernobyl. Until then, no one had been evacuated from the nearby towns. Many people compare Chernobyl to the Kursk accident in the Barents Sea, when rescue crews were sent 3 days after the submarine sank.

From Quiz Fifteen Minutes to Meltdown

Answer: Cleaning

When tributyl phosphate and nitric acid mix together, they create something known as 'red oil'. This compound can be very unstable and explosive at times, and this was the cause of the explosion at Tomsk-7 (now Seversk) in Russia. A routine cleaning of a paraffin and tributyl phosphate tank with nitric acid resulted in an explosion that ripped apart the building. This occurred on April 6th, 1993. Some of the 8773 kg of uranium and 310 kg of plutonium leaked from the tank and contaminated the area. This site was used for nuclear weapons production, amongst other things, one of six such sites around Russia. According to official statements, the plant no longer produces weapons-grade uranium.

From Quiz A Taste of Armageddon

Answer: Meltdown

The famous China syndrome almost happened when there was a partial meltdown of a nuclear reactor core. Nuclear gases caused pollution.

From Quiz Nuclear Incidents

Answer: Never happened

Although Tom Clancy theorized about such an event in his novel "The Sum of All Fears", it never actually happened.

From Quiz Chernobyl: Worst Nuclear Disaster

Answer: Red

According to "Chernobyl, History of a Tragedy" by Sergei Plokhy (published in 2019), the pine forest immediately downwind from the shattered reactor received over 20 times the radioactive material that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined and died very quickly. During the cleanup the pines were bulldozed and buried under a thick layer of sand. However, it is feared that their continued rotting may be introducing radioactive material into the water table in northern Ukraine and southern Belarus.

From Quiz Nuclear Power Plant Accidents

Answer: The graphite caught fire and the thermal plume of the fire pushed radioactive material high into the atmosphere.

The graphite burned for days and this made the release much worse that would have come from a Western style reactor even if its containment building were to be breached. The local workers were tremendously brave. Some thirty-one workers and fire fighters died trying to contain the releases. Two hundred and forty were treated for excessive radiation exposure.

From Quiz Fifteen Minutes to Meltdown

Answer: graphite

The Windscale reactor was created in post-WWII Britain because of the secrecy act (Atomic Energy Act in 1946) of the US not sharing their nuclear knowledge gained with their allies. As a result, the UK did not want to be left behind and wanted to produce their own nuclear bomb, and, the Windscale piles were built. The British reactors had a solid graphite core. Graphite is subject to the Wigner effect, meaning, when it's bombarded with neutrons, it displaces the crystal structure enough so that energy is stored in the material. This energy could potentially release at any given moment, and was a danger to the reactor. Luckily, the energy could be released in a controlled method by annealing the graphite to 250 degrees Celsius. At Windscale, due to a mistake in the measuring of the core temperature, during the annealing process, temperatures were believed to be dropping prematurely. This led the British engineers to restart the reactor and raise the temperature back. However, it was actually already hotter than usual. The resulting explosion and fire released much radioactive material into northern England.

From Quiz A Taste of Armageddon

Answer: Brazil

Radioactive pollution from nuclear plants has earned the area the nickname 'Brazil's valley of death'. 40 out of every 1000 babies are still born, 40 more die within a week of birth, genetic deformities are also occurring.

From Quiz Nuclear Incidents

Answer: 1960s

In December of 1965, such a thing happened. The carrier was the USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14). The A-4, with bomb attached and pilot still in the seat, rolled off the deck and sank in 16,000 feet of water. To anyone's knowledge, the aircraft, the pilot's remains, and the bomb are still there.

From Quiz Chernobyl: Worst Nuclear Disaster

Answer: 90 seconds

The explosion had dumped over one hundred tons of fiercely radioactive core material onto the roof of the reactor hall, which had to be removed before any reactor covering could be put in place. The soldiers were permitted to spend a maximum of 90 seconds on the roof, dropping to 40 close to the reactor edge. It should be remembered that they did this without any specialised equipment beyond crudely improvised lead aprons and respirators. Each man took an estimated 25 Rem each - 100 millirem is seen as the usual safe dose for a nuclear worker in the West, significantly less.

From Quiz Fifteen Minutes to Meltdown

Answer: boric acid

In March 2002, a safety inspection (one that had been delayed well past the December 2001 deadline) discovered that the reactor pressure vessel head had been nearly eaten through by boric acid that was leaking from a cracked pipe above it. The resulting hole was nearly the size of a football, and could have caused a serious accident had the metal ruptured, or had the acid had eaten the rest of the way through. Davis-Besse has also been subject to a stuck valve, a direct hit by a tornado, and a double-shutdown of the feedwater pumps supplying water to the steam generators.

From Quiz A Taste of Armageddon

Answer: Explosion

A cylinder of nuclear material in a storage facility exploded, killing one person and causing 130 injuries. The unit was closed for a year and the owners were fined for disregard of the environment and safety.

From Quiz Nuclear Incidents

Answer: 1970s

If you haven't heard of the 1979 Three Mile Island incident, you haven't been paying attention. A series of accidents and equipment failures temporarily shut down the cooling systems at the plant. Although the reactor never actually suffered a meltdown, and the radioactive contamination to the surrounding area was extremely slight, the damage done to the reactor itself was extensive, and if the accident had progressed a little further, the results would have been beyond disastrous ... of the order of the Chernobyl accident.

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Last Updated Nov 09 2024 5:50 AM

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