Data communications over telegraph circuits 1908

These are valid points, and also apply to "security" and the public frenzy we see unfolding in the wake of a small number of plantings and terror attacks.

This is not entirely the case. It is highly unlikely that such as system could have prevented the Chernobyl incident. Most people have uninformed notions about things which used to be much more common knowledge back when nuclear reactors were rather new technology.

Evidently what happened at Chernobyl is an example of reactor "contagioning" which was observed in the early reactors built during the WW-II Manhattan Project. There is a buildup of short-lived fission products which strongly absorb neutrons and damp the chain reaction. The conditions created by the "tests" and procedures being executed at Chernobyl created such a situation where withdrawing the control rods did not have the expected effect, so they were withdrawn yet more.

The reactor suddenly "ran away" as these fission products decayed. This caused extremely rapid thermal damage to the reactor core which prevented the control rods from operating.

What WOULD have prevented Chernobyl was reactor operators and managers who UNDERSTOOD this "feature" of such reactors, would have recognized it, and would have not proceeded to withdraw the control rods so much in the first place.

It's sort of like the infamous wind shear crash at DFW in the 1980s where the pilot attempted to maintain glide slope by correcting for the unanticipated headwind while flying into a microburst, thus placing himself in an unrecoverable situation once he was in the tailwind on the other side.

Well said.

The problem is that most people who use and operate "reliable" technology have no idea how it works or how to compensate when things inevitably go wrong.