this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
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Yes, those "tips" were like 2 meters long, basically, instead of just being breaks, the rods had dual function and also acted as accelerators, when they pressed az-5, they didn't enter first, they were already in the core, but something happened which I don't understand where once az-5 was pressed as those tips started lowering an imbalance formed and they they got stuck and it resulted in a runaway reaction, I think at least that's accepted as the most likely theory as IIRC they don't exactly know what happened.
I could be mistaken but wasn’t the issue that when the rods were fully withdrawn the graphite was also partially withdrawn so when they scrammed the first thing that happened was an insertion of positive reactivity from the graphite which was enough positive reactivity to burn up all the xenon which then caused the reactor to go prompt critical?
Like the presence of the graphite wasn’t that bad but it combined with a lack of interlocks and improperly trained operators was the big problem and of course trying to start up at the peak of a xenon transient is never ideal