Zero Hour TV -
At 1.23 a.m. on the morning of April 26 1986 the world was seconds away from its worst ever nuclear accident. Reactor number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union exploded. Zero Hour s1e1: Disaster at Chernobyl, Discovery 2004
Many see it as the first step in break up of the communist regime. ibid.
On this night Chernobyl is harbouring two deadly secrets: the first is a potentially fatal flaw in the reactor’s design which the engineers are not aware of. The flaw that makes it highly unstable when run at low power; the second secret concerns the man in charge Anatoli Dyatlov’s own history is scarred by the very technology he is seeking to dominate. ibid.
The water shortage continues to set off alarms. But none of these engineers believes a serious accident is possible. ibid.
They are the victims of years of cover-ups and negligence. ibid.
Safety came second. Accidents were common and hushed-up. ibid.
The few boron control rods still in the reactor are only partially inserted at the top. So power is building into a hotspot at the bottom of the core, where the sensors don’t always detect it. ibid.