Doesn’t matter, I doubt anyone builds Graphite Reactors any more.
Exactly. Even back then only the Soviets used Graphite Moderated Reactors.
It does matter. I was surprised to learn while watching a documentary last night called “Chernobyl Cafe” (AmazonPrime) that reactors 1 and 2 at Chernobyl were still fully operational through 2005, and are still kept at idle (as of 2016), because they can’t remove the fuel rods and they can’t be fully shut down. There is staff still running them, monitoring them. There are still twelve more of identical design throughout Russia in operation today, no containment buildings. Also, the French have quite a few reactors of similar designs with containment buildings.
There is another very good documentary called Zero Hour, Episode One, which covers the hour leading up to the disaster, filmed in the control room of Chernobyl #2, and using reactor #2, as a set, documenting how the disaster occurred. They use Russian actors, speaking in Russian with closed caption, who look exactly like the original people who were there when it went down. It’s also on AmazonPrime.
Presumably, though, the proximate cause of the Chernobyl explosion, which they originally though impossible in such a reactor design, has been ameliorated in the remaining reactors. What they determined happened, beyond the sheer stupidity of not following the test protocols by performing the test at 200MW instead of 700-1000MW, was that, the control rods had graphite tips, which when inserted into an already out-of-control chain reaction had an unexpected synergetic effect which somehow cause the chain reaction to exponentially increase instead of damping down. Had the control rods NOT had the graphite tips, they would have worked as expected. It was the unexpected synergy of the graphite being inserted into an area of the reactor that was already non-homogenously over-fissioning that caused the explosion. If they have removed the graphite tips from the control rods at the other similar designed reactors, this type of disaster should not recur. . . and, of course, not be stupid again and ignore protocols.