To be precise, Chernobyl had 31 casualties and around 4000 statistically estimated death toll. That is, life expectancy reduced because of radiation exposure.
That's basically on par with the casualties resulting from 9/11. Blaming Chernobyl on inherent dangers of nuclear power feels a lot like blaming 9/11 on skyscrapers. The USSR was absurdly reckless and incompetent. It wasn't just some freak chance that everything went wrong, even the designers of the RBMK reactor knew that operating it in the way the operators did would be catastrophic. Any competent reactor operator should have understood why the power level dropped so much at Chernobyl and should have understood why just removing the control rods was such a terrible idea to "fix" it.
How did it built the reactors to start with, then? The reality is never that simple. One interesting remark that comes often in the Legasov notes is that military handled these reactors safely, but since reactors of exactly same design were put into civil use, safety culture was not transferred, out of secrecy-induced ignorance.
Sure, there was some details about the reactor design that were not disclosed because "state secrets" but the very glaring error occurred after the operator deliberately ignored the safety limits that were shared and knowingly exceeded that by withdrawing all of the control rods. I'm not saying the USSR didn't have any capable nuclear engineers, but that operator should never have even stepped foot in a control room with their lack of knowledge of nuclear physics and a blatant willingness to just push forward when they know they don't understand what the reactor was doing. Add on top of that management insisting that they push on and get the reactor up to power, to hell with the consequences. Xenon poisoning after high output operation was not some secret safeguarded knowledge. The reactor operating limits were known to the operator, he decided to blow past them anyways.
I'd call their behavior, both management and the operator, reckless and incompetent. Even in the original design to forego a full containment structure, that was predicated on making sure that the operating limits specified were never exceeded and no one bothered to check to see if the night shift guy was clueless or not. It'd be one thing if they followed up the design to forego the containment structure with rigorous controls around ensuring competent operators and hard physical limits on reactor operations but they didn't.
According to Vyacheslav Grishin of the Chernobyl Union, 25,000 of the Russian liquidators are dead and 70,000 disabled, about the same in Ukraine, and 10,000 dead in Belarus and 25,000 disabled"
Which makes a total of 60,000 dead and 165,000 disabled (by now).
The organisation Médecins pour la prévention de la guerre nucléaire estimated that 10,000 babies had born in Europe with malformations attributable to Chernobyl, and 5,000 sucklings died by the effects of radiation.
The "but just 31 people died" statement, that conveniently forgets about the long and middle term health effects suffered, or about the effects on babies and pregnant women, is incredibly disrespectful for the victims.
I lived in Minsk, 400km from Chernobyl when it happened, so I should count as one of those "victims". Still, I would rather maintain the deathcount of 31 people and the International Atomic Energy Agency figure of 4000 projected deaths.
Crooks will tell you anything in exchange of funds and media attention.
This deathcount is just for people dying by acute poisoning radiation before 90 days. Leaving cancer and middle term effects out of the statistics is not a realistic way to measure mortality here.
More than 31 people died that day. There were emergency personnel and journalists filming molten containment rods (which was filmed), and they must be included in that 4000 because they are definitely dead.
With that 70s technology and understanding, which would you rather be a responder for, Chernobyl or The World Trade Center (after the second collapse)?
