a decade ago someone explained me the accident, and the key moment was when the reactor temperature-power point moved on the wrong side of a resonance, making it enter a supercritical state, like in a bomb, but with unoptimized design making the reaction less violent.
Xenon is also an important symptom, maybe the key to novelty. In current theory it is poisoning by xenon, after a sequence of stubborn tentative to restore normal state of the reactor, after a tentative to test the reaction of the reactor when missing cooling.
Anyway the key points are human, when Staline loose design met the new generation of managers trying to compete with the western method, but without the supercomputer and budgets.
When those managers testing stubbornly, met the politician demanding power in a starving grid.
when uninformet staff, during a night shift, obbeyed orderd without enough data.
The aftermath of the accident is also full of human failures, like letting kid drink milk from cows living in contaminated areas, moreover kids starved from sea salt and thus iodine. Not even the lack of evacuation ontime was the main problem, it was the easy forbiding of consuming milk from contaminated area that could have avoided most death toll, the few % death from the thousand of thyroid cancer in kids.
Above the radiation death toll, the death toll of the evacuation is , like in Fukushima, the dominant number. Thousand of people died and will die from psychological impact, depression, alcoholism, family violence, suicide, missed opportunities.
anyway the biggest death toll of that catastrophe was the disappearance of the health system because of USSR collapse, million of death.
beside that there is huge disinformation, that make people believe it is worse than that, but don't put the blame on the real criminals, which are mostly decisions makers not neutrons, Which blame the accidents more than the unneeded "save the politician" evacuations.
This domain is full if huge disinformation, and since I followed that since I'm kid, I know there is no hope to restore the truths, as the is no hope to restore the truth on Titanic wreckage.
Today opinion is based mostly on sacred cows and scapegoat, not on data.
LENR is just one discrete victim in that war of motivated beliefs, which by the way allow few billion $ to go to the liars, so they can lobby the politicians while accusing others of lobbying.
If one reads carefully one will realize that the new theory does not support axil's linked other magnetic-monopole-carried-by-steam pipes theory. This would require a turbine explosion first that then caused the fission runaway of some reactor cores. The new theory describes first a nuclear explosion that propelled some core debris into atmosphere, followed by a steam explosion that destroyed the reactor. Two completely contrary assumptions. The new theory supports or could explain some unclear questions of that catastrophic event in a better way than your linked paper. The author in that paper himself speaks of hypothetical assumptions whereas again they are presented as usual as facts...
Alain wrote
"poisoning by Xenon"
so interesting from Wikipedia
"Failing to anticipate and manage xenon poisoning and compensate for the subsequent burn-off properly was a contributing factor to the Chernobyl disaster;
during a run-down to a lower power, a combination of operator error and xenon nuclear poisoning caused the reactor thermal power to fall to near-shutdown levels.
The crew's resulting efforts to restore power, including the manual withdrawal of control rods not under the SKALA computer's automated control,
placed the reactor in a highly unsafe configuration.
A failed SCRAM procedure, resulting in the control rods being jammed at a level that actually increased reactivity,
caused a thermal transient and a steam explosion that tore the reactor apart"
Mizuno found high levels of Xenon from palladium/deuterium LENR.
Does xenon buildup poison LENR reactors too? or perhaps helium buildup?
I don't have any idea about possible effects of Xenon on LENR. Neutron production itself is not always mentioned (or possibly detected). I think the logical way to look at this would be to say 'if there is any Xenon detected above the level limit for contamination, something nuclear has been going on'.
Re- in big nuclear reactors....
Xenon-135 is a product of U-235 fission and has a very large neutron capture cross section (about 2.6 x 106 barns). It also decays radioactively with a half-life of 9.1 hours. Little of the Xe-135 results directly from fission, but most comes from the decay chain, Te-135 (β- decay, 0.5 min) to I-135 (β- decay, 6.6 hr) to Xe-135. The instantaneous production rate of xenon-135 is dependent on the iodine-135 concentration and therefore on the local neutron flux history. On the other hand, the destruction rate of xenon-135 is dependent on the instantaneous local neutron flux.
It could be as simple as incompetence of engineering shift that day. I've hard the story that they where testing steam turbine on dub critical regimes. The test was sanctioned but it went sideways at same point. When they decided to insert graphite rods to slow down the reaction the core was so overheated already the rods could not be inserted anymore. They got runaway reactor.
The only unanswered question what it a high energy reaction which flipped reactor cap or just a meltdown.
I'm not expert in fission, but it seems that for nuclear engineer, the poisoning by xenon, as you say a neutron absorber, is a known problem.
The reactor was dead like a car engine full of sugar, they pushed it too far and suddenly the reaction instead of being stabilized by the back side of a P/T bell curve, entered the head of a bell curve, triggering a supercritical event...
I've heard of doubling neutrons every ns...
the reactor was destroyed quickly unlike a nuclear bomb which is optimized to explode, and the event was a steam explosion, but my friend said the key was not simple heating, but supercritical event.
AlainCo write "like a car engine full of sugar,"
Only an incompetent person would unwittingly put sugar in their engine.
Definitely incompetence was huge at Chernobyl...but several other factors contributed
but no EQ/tsunami as at Fukushima.
When the persons conducting the tests on the Chernobyl reactor tried to increase the power at some point in their tests, it would not respond. They apparently did not have the understanding that the failure to increase was due to the absorption of neutrons by the xenon, so they completely removed the control rods to force the increase. The increased power then burned away the xenon and also caused voids in the cooling water, both of which rapidly increased the reaction rate, driving it out of control.
The "xenon poisoning" of the reaction rate had been known for many years, having been dealt with in the original plutonium production reactors at Hanford, Washington. In fact, it was dealt with in the original Manhattan Project where it presented itself as a dilemma - the researchers expected a given configuration to maintain a chain reaction and it failed to do so. They found that they had to increase the fuel concentration to overcome the xenon poisoning. So the phenomenon had been dealt with from the earliest days of our experience with nuclear fission, and should have been known by anyone who was in control of a nuclear reactor.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/NucEne/xenon.html
Alan Smith "there is any Xenon detected above the level limit for contamination, something nuclear has been going on"
In Mizuno et als high current 32day electrolysis of Pt/Pd in D2O
..... something nuclear was probably going on....LENR
The Xenon might have been via Iodine as at Chernobyl... but the isotope variety was not specified.
The Xenon apparently needed to be released from the surface layers by O2- bombardment.
lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MizunoTanomalousia.pdf
It is well known in LENR, that the even isotopes with 0 nuclear spin are responsive to the LENR reaction than are the old isotopes with nonzero nuclear spin.
Maybe you can cite or provide a link to some peer-reviewed papers or experiments that confirm your assumptions? What exactly is LENR reaction? Do you have a theory? I am waiting for one that will become hopefully "mainstream-physics-proof" and open a new era in nuclear physics (awarded with a Nobel prize of course) so someone who understands the effect can replicate the reaction when wanted. It is hard to see that no one on earth other than Rossi seems to have a clue (and a "product"...).
Axil"The increase of U235 percentage shows that the Uranium isotope that produced the supercritical explosion was U 238."
Urutskojev wrote five thing that could be done to confirm his hypothesis
including a thorough analysis of the isotopic makeup of the uranium fuel.
Of course this was never done.
Its interesting though.
Uranium was postulated by Dash to have a greatly accelerated rate of decay (deduced from decay radiation)
by electrolysis in water and by glow discharge
A daring man, Dash
Of course replicating his experiments using U-238 are difficult because although its OK for the US army to stick tonnes of it on tanks and artillery shells
and 'export' it to Iraq
you and I will have difficulty getting hold of it.
Zorud "It is hard to see that no one on earth other than Rossi seems to have a clue"
Rossi actually has not published very much at all.
There is much more well documented on the archive lenr-canr.org which is easily searchable
I found some of Mizuno's transmutation results interesting
lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MizunoTanomalousia.pdf
including the idea that both fusion and fission may operate in LENR.
However Montgomery and Jeffery write that both fusion and fission operate in HENR.
http://www.unclear2nuclear.com/index.php
Nothing 100% sure like death and taxes ... but this 100%ness is rather boring
I am glad that Alain used the right way with sugar to wreck an engine.
Sugar in the gas tank is ineffective, although it might plug the fuel filter. It does not dissolve in gasoline.
Sugar dumped into the oil, however, is so abrasive the damage is rapid and severe. Dumped into the oil fill port in a valve cover of an overhead cam engine, the lobes on the cams can be ground nearly flat in half a hour. If the bearings survive that long.
Maybe you can cite or provide a link to some peer-reviewed papers or experiments that confirm your assumptions? What exactly is LENR reaction? Do you have a theory? I am waiting for one that will become hopefully "mainstream-physics-proof" and open a new era in nuclear physics (awarded with a Nobel prize of course) so someone who understands the effect can replicate the reaction when wanted. It is hard to see that no one on earth other than Rossi seems to have a clue (and a "product"...).
Proving this assersion was the reason for the this experiment
Low-energy nuclear reactions and the leptonic monopole
Georges Lochak*, Leonid Urutskoev**
http://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/LochakGlowenergyn.pdf
QuoteThe idea of the experiment was as follows. The plasma channel has a small volume with respect to the volume of the whole chamber. Thus, if some salt of a metal having several isotopes is added to bidistilled water, the number of admixture atoms from the solution that get to the plasma channel would be small compared to the number of Ti atoms. It is clear that recording of the isotope shift of admixture atoms would indicate that transformation takes place throughout the whole bulk of the chamber. As this metal, we used U. Uranium has two isotopes, 235U and 238U, whose ratio can be easily measured even at a low specific concentration by means of γ, β and α-spectrometry. Figure 5 shows the 235U/238U ratios measured by various procedures and compared to the ratio measured in the starting solution. Thus, if no changes were detected after the experiment, this ratio would be equal to unity. It can be seen from the figure that the real ratio is far from unity. The isotope shift effect extends far beyond the possible errors. The shift occurs toward enrichment of the mixture in the 235U isotope. This does not mean that 238U is converted into 235U. This interpretation is wrong. We added some 137Cs isotope as the marker. Then we measured the specific activity (that is, activity divided by the volume) of each U isotope with respect to the Cs activity before and after the experiment. It was found that the activity of both U isotopes decreased with respect to that of Cs. However, the activity of the 238U isotope decreases to a greater extent. Thus, the ratio of 235U to 238U becomes bigger than unity. Prior to these experiments, we made sure that the specific activity of 137Cs does not change noticeably. The real situation is more complicated [3] but this is a topic of a separate report. For us, it is important that the transformation can also take place outside the plasma channel.
Also see
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/v…20.2867&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Experimental observation of the distortion of the
uranium isotopic relationship and violation of the
thorium- 234 secular equilibrium upon electric explosion
QuoteDisplay MoreThe experiments carried out here are rather tentative. However, despite
this fact, the experimental results provide a number of rather reliable and
unambiguous conclusions.
1. The electric explosion of the titanium foil induces distortion of the
initial isotopic relationship of uranium in a solution of uranyl sulfate.
The most pronounced distortion of the isotopic relationship is found
in the vapor gas blowout VGB, which contributes to the 235U enrichment.
RMS.VGB = 1.18 ± 0.07 for VGB and RM.S.P = 0.942 ±
0.012 for the precipitate.
2. A substantial violation of the 234Th secular equilibrium occurs.
Immediately after the electric explosion, a deficiency of 234Th up to
30 % is observed. Analysis of the curve shown in Fig. 4 shows that
the amount of 235U decreases by approximately 10 %, while the
amount of 235U decreases by approximately 10 %, while the amount
of 234Th decreases to even a greater extent, the content of 234Th being
restored over a period of 24 days.
3. The neutron flow did not exceed I < 103 neutron/electric explosion.
Therefore, the change in the uranium isotopic composition cannot be
attributed to the induced fission.
4. To elucidate the mechanism of the observed effects, further research
is needed. It is noteworthy that the effects are observed only upon
electric explosion in a liquid (a solution of uranyl sulfate) in which
high pressures are generated. Thus, the phenomenon observed might
be of the same nature as that described in publication [5] for the collapse
of artificially generated cavitons in a liquid.
sugar
"half a hour."
