I have been watching the Netflix series about the Challenger space shuttle explosion, and one episode showed a newspaper which also had a headline about the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. The Chernobyl event happened just a couple months after Challenger.
It occurred to me that both disasters happened for more or less the same reason - trained, presumably intelligent engineers and managers ignored warnings and/or bypassed safeguards to allow an evolution to take place (i.e., a shuttle launch and a reactor test). In both cases they should have known of the potential consequences, but they approved them just the same.
By the way, in a former life I was irradiated by soil from the Chernobyl site while working in a US government lab. The scientists responsible for the soil stored it in the area where I worked, and I didn't have a choice in the matter. I eventually learned that my lab was the most radioactive one on the block, so I took the first opportunity to seek other employment.
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