a Ukrainian eBay vendor on May 31 asked $2,800 for what he claimed was an "original Soviet USSR Chernobyl nuclear reactor RBMK-1000 core graphite block." The authenticity of the item could not be ...

Thirty years ago today, on Tuesday, April 26, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant melted down outside Pripyat, Ukraine. The resulting explosion killed 31 people almost immediately, and the spray of ...

The Chernobyl reactors use graphite-carbon-blocks to control neutrons. Each reactor core is “a big rectangular block of graphite,” Zebroski said. “The graphite core certainly did not ...

The site of the Chernobyl power plant sits in an exclusion ... Compounding the crisis was the fact that graphite blocks used as a moderating material in the reactor caught fire as air entered ...

What is Chernobyl like today ... And finally, once air was able to enter the core of the reactor, graphite blocks, meant to moderate reactions in a working reactor, also caught fire.

[Images: Chernobyl, Frozen in Time] "There are a ... It also used water as a coolant, but with graphite blocks as the moderator. The variations in the reactor design allowed it to use less ...

I received a call at 0500 on 26 April 1986, informing me that a major accident, followed by a fire, had just occurred in the fourth block of the Chernobyl nuclear power ... if the hot mass of nuclear ...

KIEV—The Chernobyl Museum here in Ukraine’s capital ... What happened to the block?” Only then he saw his Number 4 Block in ruins. “I physically felt my hair rising on its roots, I thought ...