za3k > archive > lexicon1 > Deljin Reactor Meltdown, The

The Deljin Reactor Meltdown was a catastrophic event that occurred on ESDTF October 22, 3647, at 4:27 PM. The incident claimed the lives of many of the plant workers in Kester City, along with several bystanders in the surrounding area. This event is what most believe ultimately caused the remaining citizens to finally abandon the city to the Orianian Wasteland.

According to survivor accounts, the meltdown began shortly before the second shift turnover, just as plant operators were finalizing logs to hand off to the next shift. There had been nominal fluctuations in the pressure and temperature readings that afternoon, but nothing that the technicians believed was any cause for concern. By the start of the second shift, the technicians discovered that temperatures had already risen beyond safe levels, and ordered an immediate evacuation of the plant. Thirteen minutes later, before the plant had been fully evacuated, the coolant system ruptured, and the resulting explosion caused a massive deposition of fissile material.

The root cause of the meltdown was attributed to several small but crucial design flaws in the cooling system held over from the more basic construction methods and materials of the later Balefyre Engines upon which the reactor was based. Particularly, it is observed that the majority of these flaws revolved around the manual operation of several aspects of the coolant pump system, which rendered the poison rods and failsafe shutdown measures ineffective, and allowed a positive feedback loop to raise temperatures beyond safe levels. Later iterations of reactor design, including the Incandescent Temporeactor, would include elements that could automatically stabilize temperatures under similar conditions, drastically reducing the risk of another meltdown in this fashion.

-Ken