LAUSR

Abstract The optical model of ball lightning opens a window to a world in which circulating light plays a decisive role. Taking into account the circulating light made it possible to explain a number of phenomena that were previously considered anomalous. Bearing in mind the circulating light, we believe that artificial ball lightning was a possible cause of the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The presence of ball lightning makes it possible to combine random and inexplicable facts into a single picture, irrefutably testifying that it was the ball lightning that caused these facts. Knowing the features of the behavior of ball lightning in gases, we analyze the sequence of events associated with the Chernobyl accident. Just as the famous detective Sherlock Holmes in the stories of the writer Conan Doyle reveals crimes on the basis of small insignificant, unrelated details, using the deductive method, we are trying to restore the true causes of the accident, taking into account those inexplicable and therefore ignored circumstances that irrefutably indicate that the trigger of the accident was artificial ball lightning that arose during the switching of large currents that took place at the beginning of the scheduled tests of electrical equipment a minute before the accident. Ball lightning arose as a result of the discharge of erosive gas in a powerful oil switch and penetrated into the mine through the steam pipeline moving, as it should be, in the direction opposite to the movement of steam.