Chapter 24
The noise in the control room was deafening!
The bleary-eyed technicians tried to function despite the cacophony of sirens wailing and warning buzzers blaring, as just about every sensor in Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant went haywire. What started out on the day shift as a planned experiment to test a new safety feature, dragged through the evening and into the night as problem after problem and operator error after operator error combined to create a highly unstable situation in the reactor core. The automatic system that activated the control rods, a critical safety feature of the plant, was disabled and nearly all the control rods were manually removed, leaving the reactor core dangerously susceptible to an out-of-control chain reaction.
By the time the exp
