@kaia Sometimes I think about how wrongly the Chernobyl reactor was operated and designed and all the clean and safe energy generation it prevented.

>Want to run reactor loss of coolant test.
>First we stall the reactor and fill it full of neutron poisons (all you can and should do before you can increase power again is to wait several days for the poisons to burn off).
>Oh wait, the test instructions note not to run the reactor test at low power (as the poor design was known to be unstable in that configuration).
>Better increase the power, but pulling out the rods isn't doing much?
>The rector computer is preventing our command to pull out more than the maximum allowed amount of rods? Better go disable that and pull out almost all of the rods.
(The chain reaction has started).
>Oh nice, the power level the test requires has been reached and it looks stable enough, although we're having a hard time keeping the reactor coolant tanks full? No matter.
>Time to cut external power to the coolant pumps and see how long they keep running from power from the spinning-down steam turbines.
(The chain reaction accelerates, as while water, especially heavy water absorbs neutrons quite well, superheated steam barely does anything).
>Test is done? Hit that SCRAM button to put all the rods into the reactor (that wouldn't be a bad idea considering the questionable state the reactor was in if it wasn't for a tip surprise).
(The rods were graphite tipped to poke into the reactor and moderate the reactor at full removal, thus what was left of neutron absorbing water was displaced by whoops, all neutron moderators)
>The power output has suddenly shot up massively, then exponentially?
>Massive steam explosion?
>Containment building would take that right? Wrong, there was no containment building, just containment walls, plus a nice flammable bitumen roof and turbine hall.
>Even then, few people died compared to the direct and indirect deaths of the numerous coal plants required to get the same amount of of power output.

TLDR; The Chernobyl disaster was the reactor operator equivalent of accelerating a car with no functional crumple zone up to 10,000km/h, then mostly cutting the power to the master brake cylinder and then deciding to yank the defective handbrake.