Chernobyl - HBO/Sky *Spoilers*

In the Soviet context, I would suspect it was a lot more to do with the plutonium production and a lot of arrogance and disregard for safety rather than cost as they were a command economy. There was no real 'cost' per se as they were not a normal economy. The state could simply direct resources at a project if it wanted to.

When you consider the lack of containment, it's fairly clear where the priorities lay, or rather didn't.

The only other country using graphite moderated reactors for civil power is the UK. They're a completely different design - cooled by CO2. In that case I'd buy the cost argument, as they wanted to use non-enriched fuel. The power density of the UK designs is extremely low, they're enormous reactors for their output. The advantage of that is that if there ever were a major problem they can cool passively without any real risk of meltdowns and because they contain no water, steam explosions are impossible - the problem being when water turns into steam it suddenly occupies a much greater volume, which is why it's both useful and potentially dangerous in a sealed system.

So generally the AGR plants in the UK would be considered to be extremely conservative as a design and pose very little risk and would have lots of safety redundancy in their designs.

The RMBK was, sadly, just a very poor piece of engineering by any standards and I would suspect a large part of that was because it was shrouded in military secrecy due to its weapons roles and the soviet command structure.

There is a second Soviet / Russian civil reactor design called VVER that is very much like what's used in the US, France etc, a fairly normal pressurised water reactor design without any of the flaws in Chernobyl/RMBK designs. It was not part of the military setup though as it doesn't produce anything useful for weapons. It's just a normal electricity plant.

That was pretty much the same argument used for Magnox and AGR gas cooled graphite moderated plants which have been the staple of UK power for decades.

They could avoid the expense of having to produce or import enriched fuels.

However AGR was insanely expensive and complex to construct. They're very safe and far from cheap but they had several sites where construction started in the 60s and grid connection happened in the mid 80s.

The AGR design was never exported as it proved so expensive to construct and the last plant built in the UK in the 1980s/90s was fine using Westinghouse PWR technology not British AGR.

No, you cannot go inside any of the building.

The nearest you can get is the monument. I was there in 2013.
Radiation was off the charts standing there. Max allowed exposure there was 60 seconds.


This is the sarcophagus in construction April 2013.