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Concept
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
Summary
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP; Чорнобильська атомна електростанція; Чернобыльская атомная электростанция) is a nuclear power plant undergoing decommissioning. ChNPP is located near the abandoned city of Pripyat in northern Ukraine northwest of the city of Chernobyl, from the Belarus–Ukraine border, and about north of Kyiv. The plant was cooled by an engineered pond, fed by the Pripyat River about northwest from its juncture with the Dnieper.
Originally named for Vladimir Lenin, the plant was commissioned in phases with the four reactors entering commercial operation between 1978 and 1984. In 1986, in what became known as the Chernobyl disaster, reactor No. 4 suffered a catastrophic meltdown and explosion; as a result of this, the power plant is now within a large restricted area known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Both the zone and the power plant are administered by the State Agency of Ukraine on Exclusion Zone Management. The three other reactors remained operational post-accident maintaining a capacity factor between 60 and 70%. In total, units 1 and 3 had supplied 98 terawatt-hours of electricity each, with unit 2 slightly behind at 75 TWh. In 1991, unit 2 was placed into a permanent shutdown state by the plant's operator due to complications resulting from a turbine fire. This was followed by unit 1 in 1996 and unit 3 in 2000. Their closures were largely attributed to foreign pressures. In 2013, the plant's operator announced that units 1-3 were fully defueled, and in 2015 entered the decommissioning phase, during which equipment contaminated during the operational period of the power station will be removed. This process is expected to take until 2065 according to the plant's operator. Although the reactors have all ceased generation, Chernobyl maintains a large workforce as the ongoing decommissioning process requires constant management.
From 24 February to 31 March 2022, Russian troops occupied the plant as part of their invasion of Ukraine.
Construction of the plant began in 1972.
Official source
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Ontological neighbourhood
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Chernobyl disaster
The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on 26 April 1986 at the No. 4 reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union. Called the world's worst-ever civil nuclear incident, it is one of only two nuclear energy accidents rated at seven—the maximum severity—on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan.
Gomel
Gomel or Homiel (Гомель, ˈɡomjɪlj, ˈɣomjelj) is a city in Belarus. It serves as the administrative centre of Gomel Region and Gomel District, though it is administratively separated from the district. As of 2023, it is the second-largest city in Belarus with 501,802 inhabitants. There are at least six narratives of the origin of the city's name. The most plausible is that the name is derived from the name of the stream Homeyuk, which flowed into the river Sozh near the foot of the hill where the first settlement was founded.
Chernobyl exclusion zone
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation is an officially designated exclusion zone around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster. It is also commonly known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the 30-Kilometre Zone, or The Zone. Established by the Soviet Armed Forces soon after the 1986 disaster, it initially existed as an area of radius from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant designated for evacuation and placed under military control. Its borders have since been altered to cover a larger area of Ukraine.