That is ONE reactor gone wrong.
Why anyone would build another one when solar is down to .21 per watts is beyond me.
That is ONE reactor that was of a design many years out of date at the time of the failure, a failure where the people at the controls turned off the safety controls, then turned off the back up safety controls, then intentionally put the reactor in an unsafe state.
France gets 76% of its power from nuclear energy and has never gone above 4 on the INES scale, with an average clean up cost of 24.7 million USD[1].
There needs to be a Godwin's law for the Chernobyl. There are so many caveats and "yes buts" and weird political contexts to everything about that accident that it really isn't helpful when talking about nuclear reactors (unless you're talking about how politics and human intervention can screw up the best laid plans of mice and men).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...
Yes, reality exists. The existence of reality and all the flaws that come with it is another argument of many against nuclear fission.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-16/france-s-...
[2] http://www.wsj.com/articles/problems-at-nuclear-components-s...
[3] http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2016/11/24/le-parc-nucle...
That is ONE dam gone wrong. Why anyone would build another one is beyond me.
Solar is not base load. To make solar base load you need solar thermal with molten salts or a gas pipe nearby to run the turbines on gas during the night. Solar PV is good for distributed power generation, as they do it in Germany where almost every building has solar PV on their roof.
Your other bet for base load power of a comparable scale to nuclear is geothermal power, but it's highly location dependent.
It's much easier not building a reactor than trying to shut it down when it's discovered that they don't keep standards.
International standards for nuclear reactor safety have been altered after Chernobyl, 9/11 and Fukushima in order to make reactors as safe as possible. That's why the construction costs went up and no company besides some Chinese holdings are able to build a nuke plant on schedule and w/o exceeding initial estimates by more than 200%.
Brezsnyev era safety standards pioneered by the RBMK creators were basically: "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country". That's why the VVER PWR is safe - it was designed by responsible people.
Yes it's possible to make a nuclear wasteland. But it's also possible to not make it.