Don't get me wrong, the Chernobyl incident was BAD, but it wasn't as bad as the media made it out to be, the plant still ran well into the 1990's.
People have lived inside the exclusion zone and still do, people who refused to leave their homes in 1986.
The view a lot of us have been given, is one that serves a political agenda, not helped by the "James Bond" derived ideas that everything nuclear is designed to kill billions of people. The purpose of the negative press is primarily to push forward renewable energy sources, which a lot of powerful people have invested A LOT of money in.
The same thing happened with Fukushima, we got a lot of inaccurate and over exaggerated stories from the media, most of the images we saw we're purely damage caused my the tsunami, but it was presented in such a way as to demonise nuclear power.
Did you know it's possible to make a battery that could run a car for over 10 years, using just the non-harmful isotopes present in nuclear waste? Image something the size of a normal car battery, capable of powering an electric vehicle way beyond it's expected service life.
Now I wonder what multi billion £ corporations would want to make sure that never saw the light of day? and I wonder how much they'd pay the right people to make sure none of us wanted it.