[Retric]

I’d be careful how you blame to operators vs power plant designers vs people designing the test vs the USSR’s culture at the time.

In that exact situation you could swap many people inside the USSR into those roles and likely get a similar result. The specific people who decided to cover up RBMK’s flaws were responding to the same incentives as the people who covered up an earlier serious incident at Chernobyl on September 9th 1982 etc.

The U.S.S.R. had a lot of nuclear issues, and there’s arguably more to learn from the indirect causes than the direct ones.

[rob_c]

For the case of this incident unfortunately yes it lies with the people stepping off the page and doing something the designer never intended.

That being said yes. Lots of lessons to be learned including, why did you build a system that allows them to do this?

Cause is easy to attribute, identifying who was irresponsible and blame less so. In this case it was caused by the operators.

[Retric]

Taking out an excessive number of control rods is something that many people have attempted including US operators. If the reactor lets you do it then that in and of itself is a massive design flaw.