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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

This is kind of like Chernobyl where they were testing to see how hot they could run the reactor to see how much power it could generate. Then things went sideways.

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The Chernobyl test was not a test to drive the reactor to the limits, but actually a test to verify that the inertia of the main turbines is big enough to drive the coolant pumps for X amount of time in the case of grid failure.

Of possible interest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijst4g5KFN0

This is a presentation to students by an MIT professor that goes over exactly what happened, the sequence of events, mistakes made, and so on.

Warning for others: I watched the above video and then watched the entire course (>30 hours).

Now I know what I'm doing the rest of this week...

As already said the test was about something entirely different. And the dangerous part was not the test itself, but the way they delayed the test and then continued to perform it despite the reactor being in a problematic state and the night shift being on duty, who were not trained on this test. The main problem was that they ran the reactor at reduced power long enough to have significant xenon poisoning, and then put the reactor at the brink when they tried to actually run the test under these unsafe conditions.

I'd say the failure at Chernobyl was that anyone who asked questions got sent to a labor camp and the people making the decisions really had no clue about the work being done. Everything else just stems from that. The safest reactor in the world would blow up under the same leadership.

At first i thought it was inappropriate hyperbole to compare Facebook to Chernobyl, but then i realized that i think Facebook (along with twitter and other "web 2.0" graduates) has spread toxic waste across far larger of an area than Chernobyl. But I would still say that it's not the _outage_ which is comparable to Chernobyl, but the steady-state operations.

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