[dylan604]

To me, Chernobyl is an example of the classic conundrum that engineers cannot possibly think of every single weird thing that could possibly happen so that a perfectly safe anything can be made. It applies to software design just as much as a nuclear reactor. Sometimes it takes a failure to actually happen before something can be made safer. Somethings are just more consequential when they fail making the learning from failure much more expensive.

[colechristensen]

Not really. Corners were cut, the ultimate issue which caused the explosion was known beforehand, and the operators violated several points of standard procedure as well as doing several basic unwise things. It was not at all a case of unknown edge cases but stupid piled on top of stupid until the damn thing exploded.

The biggest, stupidest action was trying to operate a reactor very clearly experiencing xenon poisoning including the many unsafe things they did to try to overcome the poisoning. I'm pretty sure modern reactors still shut down for 24 hours to avoid the xenon issue. This was well known, even without the design flaws this was a huge risk, and anyone with an ounce of sense would have known not to do what they did leading up to attempting to scram the reactor.