I doubt anyone ever claimed that Chernobyl was nuclear Done Right. It was probably the most unsafe reactor design ever put into production.<p>The best modern designs have a strong negative feedback: as the fuel gets hotter, the reaction rate slows down, just due to the physics of the fuel and coolant. Chernobyl did the opposite: as the fuel got hotter the nuclear reactions happened faster. It relied on human operation of control rods to keep it from blowing up. And on top of that it skipped the containment shell.