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On Friday, 25 April 1986, engineers at the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Station were preparing to shutdown their forth reactor for maintenance. They took the decision to use the maintenance window to test certain emergency safety systems, in particular those related to keeping the core cooling systems operational.

Engineers at the time were concerned that any major disturbance in the power grid would cause a peak in electricity demand from the reactor that would provoke it to overload and shut-down automatically for safety. Sadly, this safety precaution could have also shut down the water pumps that kept the reactor's core cool, and the engineers believed that the backup power generators would take too long restore power to the water pumps, causing a melt-down situation within the reactor.

The engineers had a plan to use the momentum of the turbines from the power plant to generate electricity for the water pumps while the backup generators would start up. This was a great plan on paper, but it hadn't been successfully proven on the equipment for many years since the plan was developed. Naturally, another test was required.

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