system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Would today's nuclear fail-safes prevent a disaster like Chernobyl in a similar situation?

Specifically, a disaster functionally identical to the Chernobyl disaster, but with today's security mechanisms.
gpt
It wouldn't even take *modern* failsafes.  Chernobyl 4, the one that blew up, was built in just about the poorest way possible.  There were multiple "Don't do this" things that were done that led to the explosion.

First problem was that it was just a poorly designed reactor.  The way it was set up was that the water pumps for cooling the reactor were powered off the electricity generated by the reactor.  If the reactor shuts down, that cooling pump stops.  The way this reactor was designed, it continues to generate heat even in an "inactive" state.  There are backup pumps for the cooling, but they don't kick in until 15 seconds after the main pump shuts down, and they take more than a minute to reach full capacity.  In that minute, the temperature of the coolant pipes shot up, so when the cooling water came back on, the water flashed to steam, which expands to 16 times the volume of the water, so the overpressure blew up the pipes, and actually cracked the building surrounding the reactor.  This also caused damage to systems outside the reactor core, which also exploded, and that's what led to the core of the reactor being exposed to the outside air.  It was so hot that it took 10 days to put out the fire, and the fire is what caused radioactive particles to be blown all over the place.

Second problem was that they were operating the reactor at low output, which (due to the poor cooling rod design) was significantly more unstable than at high power.

Third problem was the lack of communication between the people operating the test and the rest of the staff of the plant.