4 ms·

I’m just reading the abstract at the moment, but this paper says that there was a -nuclear- explosion, not just a steam explosion?

• meritt 9y ago
  Correct. There's a decent lay summary here: https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/new-finding-nuke-blast-crippled-chernobyl https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/new-finding-nuke-blast-cr...
• ajross 9y ago
  That's right. The finding is that the runaway fission reaction produced an explosion of the fissile material directly instead of merely overheating the enclosing cooling system. It didn't remotely approach the yield of a warhead relative to the amount of material, but it was still a "nuclear explosion".
• mannykannot 9y ago
  An important threshold is crossed if the core, or part of it, becomes 'prompt critical'. Normally, a reactor's chain reaction is only sustained with the contribution of the delayed neutrons, which are occasionally emitted by fission products, in addition to the prompt neutrons, which are emitted during fission itself. If an assembly becomes so supercritical that the reaction can be sustained by the prompt neutrons alone, the doubling time of the exponential growth in the reaction rate suddenly becomes orders of magnitude shorter, leading to an explosive release of energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_neutron#Importance_in_nuclear_reactors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_neutron#Importance_in_n...
• dboreham 9y ago
  It's always been known that there was a nuclear explosion, it was just called a "power excursion" so avoid frightening the children.
  • QAPereo 9y ago
    It was an excursion... mind you that if you drenched me in gasoline and tossed a match I’d be, “In a state of accelerated thermal decomposition.” That’s not a lie, it’s just a bland way of saying that I’d be burning like a Yule log.