Two additions to your otherwise great summary: After the Leningrad incident, the RBMK Chief Engineering organisation announced changes to the operating procedu

Two additions to your otherwise great summary: After the Leningrad incident, the RBMK Chief Engineering organisation announced changes to the operating procedures taken this incident into account to all RMBK plants. Those procedures where never written, and none of the operators asked about them neither. That was pure negligence, and no cover up (the cover up was invented by the HBO series, no idea why). What is true so, is that the whole bureaucracy and organisation in the USSR let Chenobyl 4 get away with well known safety and regulation violations before the accident, and those regulation were extremely lax by modern standards to begin with. An interesting bit about Fukushima is not the reactor design, there is apparently nothing inherently wrong with that, but rather the site. As you said, the seawall was too low, mainly because during the site development earthquakes of the magnitude that caused the tsunami where not considered despite geological proof to the contrary. That was negligence number one. Number two occured after simulations years before the tsunami predicted pretty exactly the magnitude of the earthquake and the height of the following tsunami. Despite being fully aware of that simulation, and the effects on the site, no measures where taken, e.g. updated procedures or a heigher sea wall or moving batteries and generators to higher ground. The IAEA reports on both, Chernobyl (the IAEA report in English includes translations of the two Soviet ones, and man are those two damning even before you consider who wrote them) and Fukushima are very good reads, highly recommended if you didn't read them already.