How could people prevented the Chernobyl disaster?

Answer 1

Assuming you mean a similar disaster as that one has happened and cannot happen 'again'.

Disasters cannot be eliminated completely. They never have been and they never will be.

What we can do is take all reasonable precautions, apparently not done in the case of Chernobyl.

Disasters and tragedy are part of life and of all societies, they cannot be totally eliminated.

Answer 2

Any number of ways, most of which are trivially simple:

1. the Soviet engineers that designed the RBMK type reactor could have designed it very differently, to avoid a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity, not putting moderator on the tips of the control rods, used a SCRAM system that responds in seconds instead of minutes, adding automatic lockouts to prevent operators from performing actions known to create unstable operating conditions, provide a containment building, etc.
2. the operators should not have repeated violated operating procedure rules needed for safe operation, just to perform a test.
3. the turbine rundown test performed that night should not have been controlled by an electrical engineer without any reactor training. any needed tests performed on US reactors require two engineers; the test subject engineer and a nuclear engineer each of which has veto power on any decision and can independently terminate the test at anytime for any reason.
4. the operators should have shut the reactor completely down as soon as xenon poisoning was observed following the test postponement at the request of the Kiev controller and rescheduled the test for a day or two later to let the xenon decay away, instead of fighting the poisoning (unsuccessfully) by removing nearly all the control rods. This was a fatal violation of operating procedure.
5. the turbine rundown test should have been run when the reactor was first built before it went online, instead of being skipped just so the state mandated completion date of the reactor could be met.
6. etc., etc.

Answer 3

• Proper engineering in the first place
• Not insisting on bringing the reactor on line for political reasons before required safety tests had been finished
• Correctly following safety procedures (e.g. not disabling all safety systems before performing improvised test)
• Following only stable test procedures that are not so marked up that nobody knows what they say
• Postponing testing until crew that understood marked up procedure was back on duty
• Not trying to stabilize a xenon poisoned reactor, it should have been shut down as required by procedure
• Not removing more control rods than allowed by procedure

In other words follow procedure!

Answer 4

yes at one point in history it can