h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

yeah decided best to send it off than sit and nit-pick for another hour

As a matter of fact, in the same month as the Chernobyl disaster, the Experimental Breeder Reactor (EBR) of the USA's Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) project deliberately ran two examples of not shutting down properly.
First without coolant pumps and the other with all reactor control power cut off.
As designed and expected, the EBR quietly shut down. This was after Three Mile Island, but a week or two before Chernobyl.
see PBS's Frontline interview with Charles Till
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html

Thermal reactors inevitably create plutonium that they cannot consume. Fast neutron reactors can be run as net consumers of plutonium, and are not a good source of bomb-grade.

The obsolete design of Chernobyl (graphite moderated), and especially government secrecy, made the consequences of the mistakes far worse than they need have been.

Oddly enough, since the privatization of CEGB by Thatcher's government, Britain's nuclear power has become more dangerous than when it was operated under "Crown Immunity", and France's EDF have even offered to buy some of it.

The local population were tolerant and even happy with Dounreay when it was nationally owned, and turned against it when that stopped.