It was a horrible disaster. But, 30 years after the accident, this article is trying to get readers using punchy headlines, like "Children are still being born with severe birth defects". I would have expected a BBC article to be a bit more objective on such controversial conclusions [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Chernobyl_disas...
I was also surprised they were citing those numbers as fact, as my understanding was that disagreed with the UN investigations. A recent story on HN from the Guardian contradicts the claims in the BBC article, and cites the UN investigations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11479097
In particular:
The word Chernobyl became synonymous with death on a massive scale. But perception and reality do not always neatly align; in the wake of the disaster, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and others undertook a co-ordinated effort to follow up on health effects. In 2006, after two decades of monitoring they outlined the health effects; of the firefighters exposed to the huge core doses and incredibly toxic smoke, 28 died from acute radiation sickness. A further 15 perished from thyroid cancer. Despite aggressive monitoring for three decades, there has been no significant increase in solid tumours or delayed health effects, even in the hundreds of thousands of minimally protected cleanup workers who helped purge the site after the accident. In the words of the 2008 UNSCEAR report: “There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure.
It added: “The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated. Although most highly exposed individuals are at an increased risk of radiation-associated effects, the great majority of the population is not likely to experience serious health consequences as a result of radiation from the Chernobyl accident. Many other health problems have been noted in the populations that are not related to radiation exposure.”
I found it interesting how different the BBC story was slanted from the Guardian story. As an advocate of nuclear power to my friends it was also interesting (although not scientific) to see who sent me links to which story.
The clear cutting story is interesting. It would be interesting to get a read on the lumber they pulled from the forests in terms of how much Cesium it had in the wood.
there is a lot of whitewashing of history is happening (after all there is a huge money race between big solar and wind installs and new "safe" reactors - notice that even 5-10 year ago we didn't have this tsunami of "Chernobyl was really not that big a deal of an accident" articles).
Decades after the Chernobyl there is much higher rate of cancer of internal organs, adeno- and thyroid (ie. cancers related to ingestion of radiation sources) among people who lived or spent time in the North Ukraine, South Belarus in the months right after the catastrophe. Only official statistics points to 5000 additional thyroid cancers in Belarus in people who were children at the time.
What are you basing your claim of increased cancer on? As an outsider, the only way I can get a grip on the situation is to look at claims, and the support for those claims.
for an outsider google is your friend (i intentionally didn't mention any specific cases i'm personally aware of because they can be easily shot down by "sample of 1" type of argument even though everybody around understands what it really is). For example:
"After the Chernobyl accident, children from Belarus living in highly exposed regions received mean thyroid doses by radioactive fallout higher by a factor of approximately 2 as compared to the survivors of the atomic bomb explosions. This lead to a radiation related increase of thyroid cancer incidence in children and adolescents with the highest incidence in age group 0-4 years up to now totally amounting to approximately 5 000 cases. "
Among the residents of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, there had been up to the year 2005 more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident, and more cases can be expected during the next decades. Notwithstanding the influence of enhanced screening regimes, many of those cancers were most likely caused by radiation exposures shortly after the accident. Apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure two decades after the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated. Although those most highly exposed individuals are at an increased risk of radiation-associated effects, the great majority of the population is not likely to experience serious health consequences as a result of radiation from the Chernobyl accident. Many other health problems have been noted in the populations that are not related to radiation exposure.
>There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure.
for each cancer you can google and find things like this:
"In addition, a significant two-fold increase in risk was observed, during the period 1997-2001, in the most contaminated districts (average cumulative dose of 40.0 mSv or more) compared to the least contaminated districts"
>more cases can be expected during the next decades.
yes. We're about in the middle right now - following known models of radiation exposure health effects the total numbers are projected to double over the next 20-30 years.
That's both correct and useless information. What is the BBCs agenda in this case and how do you figure it influences how they report this story?
(FWIW, I don't think the BBC has a particular agenda here, they just have the bias of having lived in a "OMG nuclear" world for the past few decades and nobody cared enough to challenge how a fairly unimportant story is angled)
Two years ago I was lucky enough to visit Chernobyl with an organized tour out of Kyev. Strange to think of part of this planet as a forbidden zone, even stranger that it's a tourist attraction.
-Definitely. I had a tour there a couple of years ago, and the takeaway memory (in addition to the slightly eerie feeling of having been dropped into a massive Fallout game) was as we walked across a bridge over a small canal, I saw the biggest sturgeon-y fish I'd ever seen.
The guide shrugged and observed something along the lines of 'This is what happens when #2 in the food chain suddenly becomes #1.'
Considering the number of people who now go on Chernobyl tours, I am just waiting for the Lonely Planet crowd to label the place 'spoiled' ;)
Another amazing 'weird' nature reserve is the DMZ between South and North Korea. You can see the most amazing birds of prey there hunting animals in the area between the propaganda villages.
Care to show some of these images? I do a search for Agra and all I see are nice images of the Taj Mahal and similarly nice architecture. A search for "Agra, India" shows some trash strewn on a beach/river-front, but no indication of a war zone or hell on earth.
But the concept far worse is very... human and emotional.. Chernobyl is uninhabitable for my years to come. But Agra is just really dirty. It is impossible to compare the tragedies of Syria, Agra and Chernobyl.
You can not downplay something just because it does not look as bad.
I visited about five years ago. Quite frankly it's pretty safe at this point. There were a few spots here and there that made the Geiger counter tick faster than usual, but for the most part the radiation level wasn't out of the ordinary. I definitely wouldn't think twice about going back. Actually, I'm pretty sure some wanderers live there these days.
There are other risks which won't show up on a geiger counter. For example the ingestion of radioactive material, which will cause a much higher effective dose than estimated by a geiger counter or dosimeter. This is called a committed dose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committed_dose
From experience. Contamination is patchy. Especially there. You can briefly step into some plutonium contaminated patch for a second, and if you had no proper decontamination on exit - bring this shit home. Once its inside the body - there is no cure.
They had all of us go through these scanners on our way out of the city to ensure nothing dangerously radioactive clung to our clothes. They didn't look like the most robust or reliable of devices, though. Found someone else's photo of them: https://www.flickr.com/photos/73155136@N00/518812012
When I worked there, and I spent 2 field seasons in 1993-94 in the 80-120Ci/sq.km zone, we had two proverbs, briefly translated as: "If you want to be a parent, keep you balls contained in lead" and "You can eat apples here, but you should bury stubs at least 140 cm deep". Only the second one was true. Mesocarp of fruits was clean, but seeds were normally contaminated with Cs 137 (replaces potassium in meristema).
The most interesting thing about the Chernobyl disaster is that it seems like human inhabitation is a more destructive force towards wildlife than the levels of radiation that are present - wildlife seems to flourish in this area.
Quite the contrary. I lived there in the 90-ies. The nature just recovers, and in 3 years humans are forgotten by wildlife. Moose and blackcock will stare at you from a 2 meter distance not recognising the threat anymore. Basically nature swiftly took back what was colonised by humans during centuries of industrial and agricultural activity there in just few years. So the event shows how insignificant humans are.
I would rather say the contrary. You can see "our" significance there, anmials forgetting their most dangerous hunter after not even 3 decades. Thats the difference, a society that can remember.
Basically 30 years after it become more and more clear that only the USSR was capable of containing such events properly. In 1986 Soviet Army soldiers with impregnated coats and shovels in just 2 weeks ensured containment of the accident to the controllable level. Something Japanese government in the 21st century cannot achieve in Fukushima with nanotech and robotics in 5 years.
Dude, Soviet Army did not sent anyone to death. There were hit and run 2min runs. Once soldier got 5Rh exposure, he was removed, directed to medics and replaced by another soldier. There have been volunteers who dedicated there lives to save the others and we honour them greatly. Only 30-yrs old or elder soldiers were accepted for decontamination works, and only those who had kids already. Their Army contractual payment was tripled. Don't speak of things you do mot know, please. So Japanese managers simply failed to account the exposure and deliver appropriate human ps up to task.
I think for many people who cannot remember these times, they automatically assume that Chernobyl was worse, simply because how could an advanced country like Japan repeat the same mistakes. Clearly, both incidents were very bad, but to assume one is worse than the other, is probably a mistake, particularly considering the Fukushima incident was so recent.
I do know which one killed more rescuers though, regardless of whose fault it was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Human_impac... vs. Fukushima's "As of September 2012, there were no deaths or serious injuries due to direct radiation exposures."
Which is why I think the OP is demonstrably wrong. Impregnated jackets and shovels can't help with seawater leaks -- the two incidents are just too different.
Apologies for the "send to death" wording, that was clumsy.
I remember those times, and Chernobyl was clearly far worse pretty much any way you want to measure it. But that was in the cards once the graphite caught fire.
Light water reactors are inherently safer - the Japanese never had to deal with a fire you couldn't put out with water and they never had to deal with fly ash.
The Pacific Ocean was contaminated down to Hawaii after Fukushima. On the other hand, Chernobyl caused massive atmospheric conmamination in Eurasia. Fortunately tech was in place and dangerous clouds were mostly brought down in Bryansk region. Good for Poland, winds blew to the East.
You cannot directly compare the magnitude and severety of consequences, but you can compare organisation and effectiveness of countermeasures. The Soviet Union in this was far more advanced country than modern Japan.
Well, more specifically, it turns out that Japan's robotics industry isn't well-suited to disaster recovery robots, and Japan was too proud to accept offers from foreign robotics companies that did have more suited robots ("we're a rich country, we shouldn't need help from anybody else").
Where are you getting this from? Robots built by Toshiba have been able to remove some 1500 spent fuel rods from reactor 4 where the radiation is lower.
Reactor 3 has so much radiation I don't think any robot can work there without getting fried.
Japanese "construction companies" were rounding up homeless people at subway stations and sending them to Fuku cleanup. They got paid around $80/day from which their room and board fees are deducted. I recall articles and photos that they didn't even have protected footwear, and had to wrap their shoes in plastic bags.
If anything, USSR had a more organized and humane (funnily enough) response to Chernobyl.
The severity of the events is not comparable and the one in Japan was, to a great extent, a consequence of a major natural disaster. There would have been no need for the Soviet Union to display its (rather dubious) expertise in containing such events if it hadn't created it in the first place.
>> Design flaws led to a power surge, causing massive explosions which blew the top off reactor four
Anybody else catch this wildly inaccurate representation of what caused the explosions? While there certainly were design flaws, it's well-known that this disaster was a direct result of the recklessness of the reactor's operators. I have to wonder if this mischaracterization is an attempt to further scare the public about nuclear power.
It's unconscionable for such a reactor design to have been made and put into service in the first place. The particular bungled test that caused the disaster was somewhat of an exceptional circumstance but the RBMK design was really just a ticking timebomb waiting to go off. If it wasn't that test it would have been something else, maybe it wouldn't have been as bad, but it would almost certainly have been at least Fukushima scale regardless.
Design flaws led to a power surge, causing massive explosions which blew the top off reactor four
Yes, admittedly the design was not great. But deliberate human actions lead to the power surge and subsequent explosion. They were running experiments on the reactor and continued dispite a series of events that were clearly not happening as planned.
I suspect the specific design flaw they're referring to is the graphite tips of the control rods, and the fact that, for the first few seconds of a SCRAM, the reaction rate is increased. And the control rods jammed in that position.
Yes, there was serious human failure in Chernobyl. But when the maximum emergency "oh shit" safety feature works by making things even more unsafe before shutting stuff down, that is the sort of design flaw that probably should be criminal.
OP is right the automatic system controlling the rods only had control over 12 rods. The others had been switched to manual. It jammed after the massive power spike causing the rods to fracture.
There were a long series of fuckups before they even got to this point.
The summary on Wikipedia says: "The SCRAM was started when the EPS-5 button (also known as the AZ-5 button) of the reactor emergency protection system was pressed: this engaged the drive mechanism on all control rods to fully insert them, including the manual control rods that had been incautiously withdrawn earlier."
I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems like it ought to be true from a fail-safe perspective.
The 2nd design flaw is the positive void coefficient due to it using light water as a coolant and graphite as a moderator. In its scheme, the light water is a neutron absorber, and if steam voids form in it, there's less water absorbing neutrons. More neutrons -> more split atoms -> more heat -> more/bigger voids, this repeats until the reactor sufficiently disassembles itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Void_coefficient
Such designs are illegal in the US, one of the reasons all but the latest version of the CANDU reactor can't be used here.
Yup. Means you can use lower enriched uranium since the reactor is primarily graphite moderated and merely water cooled (one of the most "efficient" designs possible), but it's unstable by nature and potentially very dangerous, as we've seen.
1. Lack of a containment vessel for the reactor core. All western reactors have these, this is a big deal. It's not a cure all but it helps a lot.
2. High positive void coefficient for the reactor. This meant that as the reactor got hotter and/or was depleted of coolant the fission reaction rate went up. This is very super extremely mega bad. Most western reactors are designed with negative void coefficients so that they are more inherently passively safe. All RBMK reactors were retrofitted after Chernobyl to lower their void coefficient and tweak some other safety features to make them less insanely dangerous.
3. Graphite tips on control rods. This was the straw that broke the camel's back. Which took an "on the edge" reactor and tipped it beyond, which then exploded (in a literal nuclear explosion, most likely) and scattered debris across the entire world due to design flaw #1.
Keep in mind that the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island events were fundamentally of a similar character, it was the difference in design between the two systems that led to one being a minor "incident" with almost negligible radiation release and one being a catastrophe with global implications.
Half of Europe got contaminated with the fallout for thousands of years, from the north down to the Alps many countries were and still are effected. The same idiotic disaster happened again in Japan (and could have been easily prevented by attaching generators, but fearing loosing the face, it was a cultural problem), and contaminated huge parts of the ocean, Hawaii and the west coast. Only a few countries stopped using or never used this very problematic technology. Hopefully, we don't have to see a third such disaster. Neither Soviet Union (USSR) nor Russia, Ukraine or Japan paid other countries money for the damage their action or non-action they did.
Apparently the downvoters are either lobbiest of the atom lobby, from those named countries or should read more about the history. The true history isn't always nice.
Coal power is probably responsible for more radiological deaths and injuries than nuclear power, certainly in normal operation (although given the acute impact of specific release events, you might have to include the entirety of the Industrial Revolution to balance out again, which isn't necessarily a fair comparison).
On the other hand, if you want to go for specific acute events, hydroelectric dams make nuclear power look safe. The only way to claim otherwise is to choose your dates to ignore the failure of the Banqiao Dam (171,000 deaths) and take the unreasonable high end of death toll estimates from Chernobyl and Fukushima. Presently, Mosul Dam is an excellent example of just how dangerous and real major dam failures can be.
All true, but there is one difference, those are visible, their danger is visible or can be smelled (at least by educated people). The half life of C137 and other are invisible and contaminated larger areas and will be not good for people health for many hundreds and often thousands of years. So these two disasters are rather serious, and there isn't even an real solution where to store the waste of atomic plants. Just dumping the waste somewhere in Nevada, Ural, Kazakhstan or at the bottom of the ocean isn't a real solution. No other energy technologies (beside fusion) needs any thinking about storage of waste (secure storage for thousands of years).
The resulting flood waters caused a wave, 10 kilometers (6.2 mi) wide and 3–7 meters (9.8–23.0 ft) high in Suiping (遂平), to rush onto the plains below at nearly 50 kilometers per hour (31 mph), almost wiping out an area 55 kilometers (34 mi) long and 15 kilometers (9.3 mi) wide, and creating temporary lakes as large as 12,000 square kilometers (4,600 sq mi).
It may make you feel better to assume that those downvoting your post are part of some pro-nuclear conspiracy, but the truth of the matter is that you appear to have an unscientifically hyperbolic understanding of what the effects of both disasters were, and you are as a result being downvoted by people who are better-educated about this subject.
Those should get off one's high horse. Yeah, it seems some received biased (higher?) education and don't grasp the long term effects. Playing the conspiracy card is just stupid. It might be a cultural issue. Objectively, atomic technology is only viable if you don't even think about longterm storage and possible disastrous fallout events. At the moment I live in a first world country that never operated (and never will) atomic power plants (it was voted against it). It produces more power than needed with water, gas, wind and photovoltaic power plants and closed all coal power plants years ago. And yes I know on HN many lobby for atomic research and programs. Some are pretty irrational to the society and environment, and look only for their own wallet.
I know you probably won't care to take this seriously, but you may stand to benefit by checking what you are basing your opinion upon; there is a fantastic amount of misinformation on this subject accepted as truth, and doing some basic research may show you that your beliefs are not grounded in reality.
The following things are true, but do feel free to double-check, these facts are not controversial: nuclear energy is far, far safer per kWh than those power sources your country voluntarily switched to; the UN -- using the very conservative & pessimistic linear-no-threshold model -- expects that approximately 4,000 people will eventually die as a result of our most catastrophic nuclear disaster in human history (it seems others in this thread have given you good examples of disasters caused by non-nuclear power sources, so I won't repeat those numbers here); and the volume of waste generated by a 1 GWe nuclear reactor (were it reprocessed and vitrified) would fill right around three cubic meters.
Those things are probably a little hard for you to swallow -- I understand, you've probably spent your entire life being preached to about the dangers of nuclear power, especially if you're in a country that's remotely close to the disaster in Ukraine -- but, really, try to take a deep breath and make sure you know why you believe what you do.
Is news coverage of an old nuclear accident Britain's way of consoling Ukraine after failing to offer significant support in the fight against Putin's invasion?
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadIn particular:
The word Chernobyl became synonymous with death on a massive scale. But perception and reality do not always neatly align; in the wake of the disaster, the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) and others undertook a co-ordinated effort to follow up on health effects. In 2006, after two decades of monitoring they outlined the health effects; of the firefighters exposed to the huge core doses and incredibly toxic smoke, 28 died from acute radiation sickness. A further 15 perished from thyroid cancer. Despite aggressive monitoring for three decades, there has been no significant increase in solid tumours or delayed health effects, even in the hundreds of thousands of minimally protected cleanup workers who helped purge the site after the accident. In the words of the 2008 UNSCEAR report: “There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure.
It added: “The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated. Although most highly exposed individuals are at an increased risk of radiation-associated effects, the great majority of the population is not likely to experience serious health consequences as a result of radiation from the Chernobyl accident. Many other health problems have been noted in the populations that are not related to radiation exposure.”
The clear cutting story is interesting. It would be interesting to get a read on the lumber they pulled from the forests in terms of how much Cesium it had in the wood.
Decades after the Chernobyl there is much higher rate of cancer of internal organs, adeno- and thyroid (ie. cancers related to ingestion of radiation sources) among people who lived or spent time in the North Ukraine, South Belarus in the months right after the catastrophe. Only official statistics points to 5000 additional thyroid cancers in Belarus in people who were children at the time.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18923372
"After the Chernobyl accident, children from Belarus living in highly exposed regions received mean thyroid doses by radioactive fallout higher by a factor of approximately 2 as compared to the survivors of the atomic bomb explosions. This lead to a radiation related increase of thyroid cancer incidence in children and adolescents with the highest incidence in age group 0-4 years up to now totally amounting to approximately 5 000 cases. "
Among the residents of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine, there had been up to the year 2005 more than 6,000 cases of thyroid cancer reported in children and adolescents who were exposed at the time of the accident, and more cases can be expected during the next decades. Notwithstanding the influence of enhanced screening regimes, many of those cancers were most likely caused by radiation exposures shortly after the accident. Apart from this increase, there is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure two decades after the accident. There is no scientific evidence of increases in overall cancer incidence or mortality rates or in rates of non-malignant disorders that could be related to radiation exposure. The incidence of leukaemia in the general population, one of the main concerns owing to the shorter time expected between exposure and its occurrence compared with solid cancers, does not appear to be elevated. Although those most highly exposed individuals are at an increased risk of radiation-associated effects, the great majority of the population is not likely to experience serious health consequences as a result of radiation from the Chernobyl accident. Many other health problems have been noted in the populations that are not related to radiation exposure.
for each cancer you can google and find things like this:
http://www.cancer.fi/syoparekisteri/en/research/breast-cance...
"In addition, a significant two-fold increase in risk was observed, during the period 1997-2001, in the most contaminated districts (average cumulative dose of 40.0 mSv or more) compared to the least contaminated districts"
>more cases can be expected during the next decades.
yes. We're about in the middle right now - following known models of radiation exposure health effects the total numbers are projected to double over the next 20-30 years.
(FWIW, I don't think the BBC has a particular agenda here, they just have the bias of having lived in a "OMG nuclear" world for the past few decades and nobody cared enough to challenge how a fairly unimportant story is angled)
The guide shrugged and observed something along the lines of 'This is what happens when #2 in the food chain suddenly becomes #1.'
Considering the number of people who now go on Chernobyl tours, I am just waiting for the Lonely Planet crowd to label the place 'spoiled' ;)
Type "agra filth" in Google search. That is how the ENTIRE surrounding area looks.
http://www.escapethecity.co.uk/wp-content/gallery/Agra-Taj-M...
You can not downplay something just because it does not look as bad.
Photos from my trip: https://www.flickr.com/photos/127718378@N07/albums/721576485...
I mean, I don't imagine people going there to be eating random stuff they find. So maybe from dust and other small particles you don't notice?
https://twitter.com/chernobylstatus/status/72495666416050995...
I do know which one killed more rescuers though, regardless of whose fault it was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Human_impac... vs. Fukushima's "As of September 2012, there were no deaths or serious injuries due to direct radiation exposures."
Which is why I think the OP is demonstrably wrong. Impregnated jackets and shovels can't help with seawater leaks -- the two incidents are just too different.
Apologies for the "send to death" wording, that was clumsy.
Light water reactors are inherently safer - the Japanese never had to deal with a fire you couldn't put out with water and they never had to deal with fly ash.
Which was meaningless unless you were closer than about twenty miles at the worst. The fact that you can measure it is irrelevant.
Crops were contaminated by Chernobyl, and people ate those crops.
Reactor 3 has so much radiation I don't think any robot can work there without getting fried.
If anything, USSR had a more organized and humane (funnily enough) response to Chernobyl.
Anybody else catch this wildly inaccurate representation of what caused the explosions? While there certainly were design flaws, it's well-known that this disaster was a direct result of the recklessness of the reactor's operators. I have to wonder if this mischaracterization is an attempt to further scare the public about nuclear power.
Yes, admittedly the design was not great. But deliberate human actions lead to the power surge and subsequent explosion. They were running experiments on the reactor and continued dispite a series of events that were clearly not happening as planned.
Yes, there was serious human failure in Chernobyl. But when the maximum emergency "oh shit" safety feature works by making things even more unsafe before shutting stuff down, that is the sort of design flaw that probably should be criminal.
There were a long series of fuckups before they even got to this point.
I don't know if that's true or not, but it seems like it ought to be true from a fail-safe perspective.
Such designs are illegal in the US, one of the reasons all but the latest version of the CANDU reactor can't be used here.
1. Lack of a containment vessel for the reactor core. All western reactors have these, this is a big deal. It's not a cure all but it helps a lot.
2. High positive void coefficient for the reactor. This meant that as the reactor got hotter and/or was depleted of coolant the fission reaction rate went up. This is very super extremely mega bad. Most western reactors are designed with negative void coefficients so that they are more inherently passively safe. All RBMK reactors were retrofitted after Chernobyl to lower their void coefficient and tweak some other safety features to make them less insanely dangerous.
3. Graphite tips on control rods. This was the straw that broke the camel's back. Which took an "on the edge" reactor and tipped it beyond, which then exploded (in a literal nuclear explosion, most likely) and scattered debris across the entire world due to design flaw #1.
Keep in mind that the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island events were fundamentally of a similar character, it was the difference in design between the two systems that led to one being a minor "incident" with almost negligible radiation release and one being a catastrophe with global implications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Effects
Apparently the downvoters are either lobbiest of the atom lobby, from those named countries or should read more about the history. The true history isn't always nice.
On the other hand, if you want to go for specific acute events, hydroelectric dams make nuclear power look safe. The only way to claim otherwise is to choose your dates to ignore the failure of the Banqiao Dam (171,000 deaths) and take the unreasonable high end of death toll estimates from Chernobyl and Fukushima. Presently, Mosul Dam is an excellent example of just how dangerous and real major dam failures can be.
The resulting flood waters caused a wave, 10 kilometers (6.2 mi) wide and 3–7 meters (9.8–23.0 ft) high in Suiping (遂平), to rush onto the plains below at nearly 50 kilometers per hour (31 mph), almost wiping out an area 55 kilometers (34 mi) long and 15 kilometers (9.3 mi) wide, and creating temporary lakes as large as 12,000 square kilometers (4,600 sq mi).
The following things are true, but do feel free to double-check, these facts are not controversial: nuclear energy is far, far safer per kWh than those power sources your country voluntarily switched to; the UN -- using the very conservative & pessimistic linear-no-threshold model -- expects that approximately 4,000 people will eventually die as a result of our most catastrophic nuclear disaster in human history (it seems others in this thread have given you good examples of disasters caused by non-nuclear power sources, so I won't repeat those numbers here); and the volume of waste generated by a 1 GWe nuclear reactor (were it reprocessed and vitrified) would fill right around three cubic meters.
Those things are probably a little hard for you to swallow -- I understand, you've probably spent your entire life being preached to about the dangers of nuclear power, especially if you're in a country that's remotely close to the disaster in Ukraine -- but, really, try to take a deep breath and make sure you know why you believe what you do.
And that waste will be no more radioactive than the ore it was mined from in about 600 years.
(Now, that's not entirely safe stuff for your children to roll around in, but it helps put the issue in perspective.)