Dollezhal and the technicians of NIKIET believed that suddenly cutting off the electricity generated by the reactor would be disruptive to the operation of the Soviet grid. And they thought that such an immediate shutdown would be necessary only in the extremely unlikely event of a total loss of external power to the plant. So they designed the AZ-5 system to only gradually reduce the reactor’s power to zero. Rather than dedicated emergency motors, the system was driven by the same electric servos that moved the manual reactor control rods, used by the operators to manage reactor power during
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