CHERNOBYL

The Emergency Shutdown

In the control room, an emergency shutdown of the reactor is ordered. The control rods begin slowly descending back into the reactor. It takes 20 seconds to fully lower them. To make an already bad situation worse, the control rods' graphite-tipped design caused power to momentarily increase further. The control rods never make it down. Power doubles every second and ultimately reaches 30 GW—ten times normal.