RBMK
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The RBMK is a class of graphite-moderated nuclear power reactor designed and built by the Soviet Union. It is somewhat like a boiling water reactor as water boils in the pressure tubes. It is one of t
View of the Smolensk Nuclear Power Plant site, with three operational RBMK-1000 reactors. A fourth reactor was cancelled before completion.
Reactor hall of the RBMK-1500 at Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, Lithuania—the upper biological shield (UBS) lies several meters below the floor of the reactor hall. There are no channel covers on the fuel channels of the reactor; the control rod drives are below the colored covers.
RBMK reactor with fuel channel covers
RBMK reactor fuel rod holder Uranium fuel pellets, fuel tubes, distancing armature, graphite bricks
Valery Legasov
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Valery Alekseyevich Legasov was a Soviet inorganic chemist, professor at Moscow State University, first deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, and a member of the Academy of Scie
RBMK
…likelihood of further reactivity accidents, at the cost of higher enrichment requirements of the uranium fuel. In his posthumously published memoirs, Valery Legasov, the First Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, revealed that the institute's scientists had long known that the RBMK had…
Legasov, c. 1986
Valery Legasov
Reactor 4 several months after the disaster.
Legasov (second from right) at a Vienna press conference, August 1986