“... On the morning of July 15, 1945, on a stretch of semi-desert land about 50 airline miles from Alamogordo, New Mexico ... just at that instance there rose from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one. ... At first it was a giant column that soon took the shape of a supra mundane mushroom.” this quote, from William L. Laurence, the official journalist during the Manhattan project is the first eyewitness of the power of nuclear energy and the birth of a new era in mankind, The Atomic Era. Shortly after the atomic bombs were dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and world war two was drawing to an end, two world powers, the U.S and the Soviet union were launched into a cold war that would last almost a hundred years. During this period of tension between the two superpowers, both nations fought against each other, not through wars and battles , but through weapon development and technological advances. Both nations stocked up on tons of weapons and constantly competed with each other, trying to create the best weapon or advance in technology before the other side did. Both nations were also developing the uses for nuclear energy, through the large naval carriers , the nuclear submarines , and also nuclear energy plants. The The Chernobyl complex in Kiev, the capitol of Ukraine, was one of the largest plants that the Soviet union had ever built. Its six-unit complex was the beginning of the soviets future plans to increasing the use of nuclear energy . [1] On April 26th , 1986, at approximately one a.m, the workers on the plant were testing on Reactor-four to see how long the reactor would keep turning the turbines and supplying power after the power was turned off. Not long after they had begun their test, the reactor core began to run dangerously low on the fuel it used to cool down the rods with and system began to meltdown. A few seconds later , an explosion erupted from Reactor-four and thus...
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