At their first planned maintenance shutdown, the Chernobyl operators found that the serpentine plumbing of the reactor was riddled with faults: the water-steam coolant pipes were corroded, the zirconium-steel joints on the fuel channels had come loose, and the designers had failed to build any safety system to protect the reactor against a failure of its feed-water supply—eventually, the Chernobyl engineers had to design and fabricate their own. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the reactor designers continued to discover further troubling flaws in their creation.
