Quote:
Originally Posted by Catfish
Half-life and half truths..
" [...]The reactor had no "design flaws." The reactors of the 60s and 70s were optimized for performance. Safety was not a central issue (as with the Fukushima reactors, also a product of that time). The Russian designers were well aware of the weaknesses of the design, the operating rules considered this accordingly. But this only works with a good safety culture, and the latter was missing completely.
In the Leningrad 1 nuclear power plant 1974, the first year of operation with a "Chernobyl type reactor", several serious problems occurred. Among other things, a partial meltdown occurred with partial destruction of the reactor core. Three employees died. And in 1982 a meltdown also occurred in Block 2 of Chernobyl. In both cases, significant amounts of radioactive substances were released as the reactors had no containment. Lessons were barely learned; on the contrary, everything was kept top secret. [...] "
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Some points:
The 1975 incident in Leningrad was on a powerplant operated by a different agency (not the one that operated other RBMKs), which indeed was very secretive.
During that period of operation several safety measures were introduced, such as the inclusion of bottom insertion rods into the AZ5 command, but those were not yet retrofitted to blocks 3 and 4 (they were on blocks 1 and 2 on Chernobyl for example).