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by man8alexd 208 days ago
Everything about nuclear reactors was secret by default, no student would have known any details about the RBMK reactor.

The "positive scram effect" was discovered at Ignalina (where the miniseries were filmed) in 1983. The RBMK design organization NIKIET sent an official informational letter to the power plants and proposed changes to the design and operational procedures. The changes weren't implemented as "there was a widespread view that the conditions under which the positive scram effect would be important would never occur." The same as O-rings.

And there was no "a Soviet program to fail Jewish students". Just primitive ground-level anti-semitism.

1 comments

As shown in the series, the article about AZ-5 increasing reactor power instead of decreasing it was classified a LOT higher and inaccessible to the researchers of the institute, and it was only that specific article. They explicitly hid the table of contents and that one article. It was explicitly suppressed, not accidentally classified along with a bunch of other stuff.
You do understand that the series is a fiction?

The scan of the letter is available online, there are no redactions and no security classification markings.

http://accidont.ru/PS_letter.html