On the night of April twenty-sixth, a terrible explosion occurred at the fourth power unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The first victims are two substation workers. The final number of victims of this tragedy is unlikely to ever be announced. The causes of the terrible tragedy are still theories.
Theory number 1. Human factor
Immediately after the accident, the leaders and the managing staff of the station were the first to be blamed. This conclusion was previously given by a special state commission of the USSR. This assumption was also made at the IAEA. The Advisory Committee, guided by the materials provided by the USSR, also concluded that the accident was the result of the coincidence of various violations of the rules for the operation of the station by the operating personnel, which is unlikely.
The accident acquired such large-scale catastrophic consequences due to personnel errors. For the same reasons, the reactor was transferred to an abnormal mode. According to the experts of the created committee, all these gross violations in the rules of operation of the station consisted in carrying out the necessary tests at any cost. And this despite the fact that the state of the reactor has changed. Technological protections, which could simply stop the operation of the entire reactor, were not launched on time, while still in good working order, and the scale of the disaster in the first days after the explosion was hushed up.
Theory number 2. Disadvantages in the design of a nuclear reactor
In the USSR, a few years later, they still changed their minds to blame only the personnel of the nuclear power plant for everything that happened. A special commission of the atomic supervision of the Soviet Union came to the conclusion that the accident itself was the fault of the personnel. But it acquired such a catastrophic scale only because of malfunctions in the very design of the nuclear power plant reactor, its flaws.
The IAEA also had this opinion, only a couple of years later. They published their view of the accident in a special report. It is also presented here that the main reason was errors in the design of the reactor and its very design. Errors in the work of the staff were also mentioned here, but as an additional factor. The report points out that the main mistake was that the workers still kept the reactor operating in a dangerous mode.
Theory number 3. Influence of natural disasters
Other versions of what happened, different from the opinion of experts, appeared. For example, that the cause of the disaster was an earthquake. This version could also confirm that after the accident there was a local earthquake. The basis is the assumption of a seismic shock, which was recorded in the area of the nuclear power plant. However, the NPP employees, who were at the work of other reactors, did not feel anything at all.
