It is a law of engineering that every engineer will claim his code is the most efficient, his car the best and hist nuclear power plant the safest. WWER-440 ha

It is a law of engineering that every engineer will claim his code is the most efficient, his car the best and hist nuclear power plant the safest. WWER-440 has no closed safety vessel, poor emergency cooling and no redundancy to speak of. It is a PWR design that is maybe on par with a poor western BWR. Also, all the reactors in West Germany were continually retrofitted, especially after the lessons learned due to Czernobyl. That wasn't feasible for a Sowjet design during the breakup of the Sowjet Union (while a lot was built in the GDR, there was also a lot that would have been imported).