Chernobyl Nuclear Accident Congressional Hearings Transcript

41
presses the brake pedal to slow down a car but finds instead that it
accelerates tremendously.
Within three seconds, power production in the reactor's core
surged to 100 times the normal maximum level, and there was a
drastic increase in temperature. The result was two explosions that
blew off the 2,000-metric-ton metal plate that sealed the top of the
reactor, destroying the building housing it.
There had been over 230 metric tons of fuel in unit number four,
incl'-ding 192 tons of fuel in
the core of the reactor. As a result of the
explosion and fire of the reactor, the environment was polluted by a
part of released nuclear fuel amounting to as minimum 90 million
curie of radioactivity including radioactive iodine,
cesium, plutonium,
strontium and several other Isotopes. The rest of fuel was dispersed
within the damaged reactor and around it. Intensity of radioactivity
could be compared to that which would result from the simultaneous
explosion of 500 A-bombs similar to the one that was dropped on
Hiroshima In August 1945. The hot gases from the burning reactor
were being thrown into the atmosphere for at
least ten days after the
accident and rose to the altitude of about three thousand feet, only
gradually sinking to lower altitudes. The radioactive cloud that was
hanging above the nuclear-power plant was carried
by winds towards
the Ukrainian land of Polissya and some areas of Belarus and Russia.
A little later higher levels of radioactivity were registered in parts of
Sweden. Finland. Poland. Germany, Romania. Turkey, Georgia,