Chernobyl was a piss-poor design as well. It had no fail-safes on it.
I'll just have to comment on this one. Chernobyl HAD failsafes and safety systems. They had all been INTENTIONALLY turned off prior to the accident, because the safety systems wouldn't allow performing the experiment they were doing. And it just happens that the experiment was known to be dangerous by designers of the plant, and it was strictly against the safety code to perform a lot of the things that were done that day.
Go on, look up the net about it, you'll find that they were performing an experiment there, the staff on-site didn't have a clue about technical details of how the plant worked and didn't know about how to safely operate it. The design had some "counter-intuitive" details, which were properly documented and had safety systems so nobody could screw up, but they broke the rules, multiple times, and turned off most of the safety systems of the plant to proceed.
"Human error" is a polite way to put what happened as a result. Some jerk wanted to try out something with a live plant, and didn't bother to do the paperwork to get the experiment approved by people who understood stuff. Ofcourse, he probably knew it wouldn't be approved because it broke several safety regulations, and that's why they proceeded with it...
As long as workers are properly educated about the plant operations and safety, such events aren't going to happen again.
