Chernobyl 30 years later

Some notes:

Yeah, per a later study as described in Wikipedia, slamming the control rods home was the final fatal mistake, because their tips were inexplicitly made of graphite (a moderator if pure enough), and they displaced light water that in this reactor design was a neutron absorber. Add the (illegal in the US) positive void coefficient of this light water used for cooling, and you get exponential growth of the nuclear reactions until the reactor sufficiently disassembles itself.

"500 roentgen" is something more like about the LD50 for generic radiation due to bone marrow effects, so you'd expect around half of those viewers to survive without treatment. Add another 50% and the lining of small intestines get killed, which is not survivable in any way.

The wildlife is tough to beat. Wolves and bears and big cats, even wild horses, thrive inside the perimeter.

Which suggests that the dangers of radiation are a bit overhyped. Then again, we humans have longer lifespans, and thus more time for a cancer to slip by the body's defenses.

This "3,000 year" estimate is interesting. The metric I've read is that generic US civilian nuclear reactor waste decays in 600 years to stuff that's no more radioactive than the ore it was mined from, which I grant you is not stuff your children should be rolling around in (and that, or rather the radon from it, is death to smokers, but so are many many other things when combined with smoking). This corium is not quite the same thing, though ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corium_(nuclear_reactor) ).

A million years is ridiculous, a definition of safety that's self-defeating.