If it is any comfort: It is very hard to cause a serious nuclear accident. The Chernobyl (however it is spelled) disaster in Ukraine was caused not by a fault, but by deliberate mishandling of the reactor. All safety systems were shut down to carry out experiments with the reactor. The control room staff saw what was coming, but were not authorised to act. Or at least nobody dared until it was too late. The fact the reactor was was made of flammable graphite and lacked real walls around the reactor allowed the spread of contamination.
There are nuclear reactors which are even less safe than Chernobyl even closer to home, which I find somewhat disturbing. The only good news which came out of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 was that radiation is not as dangerous as previously thought. The predicted long term deaths (cancer etc.) have not happened. The deathtoll remain at a few hundred, mostly firefighters and rescueworkers.
Nesparky is right in that a well kept reactor is very safe. Accidents can happen in a nuclear powerplant in the western world too, but not a disaster. It can be noted that the Chernobyl accident only became known to the world when the contamination set off the detection system at the Swedish Forsmark plant, a thousand miles away.
