What were the rooms adjacent to the core, below the steam separators but above the pumps

No Chernobyl reactor had a service life over twenty years. My understanding is Reactors #1 and #2 were shut down/left offline due to being non-economical to repair, and I've heard (potentially false) rumors that #3 wasn't exactly in good shape when it was shut down for political reasons.

Russia is getting 40+ years out of their RBMK fleet. If we assume the worst-that they're in awful shape and have had significant contemporary incidents that we don't know about, they're still economical for Russia to operate. This is despite the remaining/recently shut down reactors operating roughly twice as long as the longest-operational ChNPP reactor.

I could see Russia having more resources (and perhaps at a cheaper cost) to maintain their fleet, but I realize turbine fires like Chernobyl #2 experienced are very destructive. On the other hand, it seems likely there were real reasons other than coincidence why ChNPP faired so poorly.

Has there been any studies comparing ChNPP's reliability to the Russian RBMKs?

I've looked everywhere for information on these, but I can't find it anywhere.

https://preview.redd.it/6cep6oc4fcge1.jpg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a20eebbfab5a65321287651f2a95a41de7a16589

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Discussions on the way Anatoly Dyatlov is portrayed in the HBO series is a frequent topic here so I thought I'll share my thoughts on it.

I grew up in Eastern Europe, and spent my first career years there, from summer jobs to a couple of full time employments. I had teachers acting the same towards school children, and personally met bosses with the same attitude as Dyatlov in not just one job. Usually to a lesser extent with less physical violence, but the feeling that if you fail something or make the boss unhappy there are 100 people queuing to get your job was widely prevalent. The boss was the big guy, and you had to know your place. His boss was the same towards him, all the way to the top. Adult men with stomach cramps from stress of just going to work wasn't anything we considered unusual, it's just the way the world worked for us. This started early in life for millions of people, Eastern Europeans didn't read books on good parenting and talking to your children, some families were lucky, but almost everyone I knew would just get a few slaps, so we quickly learned to hide our mischiefs and stupid things we did. This approach was simply deeply rooted in the society and it took me many, many years to change it as an adult.

Dyatlov wouldn't admit to his errors in the HBO series, because that simply was the soviet work culture. There was no room for error and learning from mistakes, you just blame someone else and hope it's now their problem. I find this part of it extremely accurate.

Was he a complete jerk by modern standards? True. Were everyone in his position in the USSR exactly the same? Also true.

Coincidentally, here's my high school math teacher:

https://uwaga.tvn.pl/reportaze/terror-na-lekcji-matematyki-ls6693546

It only made the news in mid 2000s, then again 10 years later as nothing has changed, in my school days it was the norm. Of course not all teachers were the same, but enough to fuck up millions of people for life. Even if somehow a kid would own a vhs camera to record it, nobody would care. You don't need to understand the language to catch the tone of her voice and a few 'kurwas', I used to have straight As in primary school, thanks to her I nearly failed it in HS and would make up feeling sick just to avoid going to her classes almost every week in the last year.

I brought this to show you that if some teachers would scream "you piss me off you fucking moron", imagine what bosses would do. But that's just how it was for us, bosses are jerks and vent off their floppy dick frustration at work, whatcha gonna do about it.

Dyatlov was a product of the place and time he lived in, that's it.

https://preview.redd.it/qlzs0jgogbge1.png?width=590&format=png&auto=webp&s=08dfd8da6d31ca94c5a6f1d88f6e50ac83024ae6

I think its on Zavodska street on Pripyat, but i dont have any image or coordinates of it, and i want to find it as a reference for a project im currently making

I was watching That Chernobyl Guy's video series on how reactor 4 exploded and have two questions. He stated that when Toptunov switched to global control the first group of automatic regulators fully withdrew because power was below the set point, the second group jammed due to an imbalance, and the third group didn't come online. Then a self-propelled control rod fully inserted itself and caused the power drop.

The first is why did the second group of automatic regulators jam and what was the imbalance in the core?

The second is what exactly is a self-propelled control rod? He stated that sometimes control rods just... inserted or extracted themselves without any input. Why did they do this and what caused it? Was it just a random glitch in the control system?

To be clear, I'm not questioning the accuracy of his account, I'm just asking for further details.

I read on Wikipedia that Dyatlov was a difficult employer, but is there evidence to suggest he was as big of a jerk as he was portrayed on the show?

Aside from the exclusion zones specifically over Western Europe? I could see it hitting nearby countries, but it was as far-reaching as Ireland. Why wasn't Russia equally affected? Was it weather patterns? *Cough* a lack of reporting from Soviet authorities (and maybe Russia was indeed affected)?

Edit: I assumed the wind blew from west to east.

It's a detail, but it's still been bugging me recently. The water flowing in is often presented as inevitability, you either have displacers (in this case graphite) filling in the space left after a rod is withdrawn, or water will flow into that space instead, but I can't think of a reason for why water would be getting involved. It seems like the rod could easily go through a waterproof chamber, no need to allow this pesky water in and bother with displacing it, but on the other hand, I'm no expert on this and there's probably some simple explanation I'm missing.

(Note: for those who don't know, the displacers are the 4.5m long graphite "tips" hanging from the control rods that triggered the accident. For more context jump here: https://chernobylcritical.blogspot.com/p/bitter-wormwood.html)

EDIT: well that was quick. Thanks for the answers!

https://youtu.be/FYtk3_j0Goc?si=dSnHwB1OdWBK4rrk

did the technicians do everything correctly or no?

Could someone maybe explain to me how rbmk reactors generate energy. Like I generally understand how nuclear power is generated, but I would like to know how rbmk reactors specifically differ from the more widely used ones at the time.

I'm currently hyper fixating on the chernobyl disaster, and holy shit the shere amount of mismanagement that defined the chernobyl powerplant make me realize how much worse it could have been. And also like half of the powerplant was stolen during construction. The soviets are frfr crazy.