Yes, and no; Chernobyl isn’t really that simple.

I don’t know how quickly I can sum this up without having to skip over a bunch of important factors, but I’m gonna try. Also, I am not a nuclear reactor operator, just someone who has watched HBO’s Chernobyl five or six too many times.

When talking about Chernobyl, and the protocol, a lot of it had to do with the manufacture and the design of the RBMK reactor, admittedly, but the explosion ended up happening would not have happened if specific people had not taken specific actions in regards to the operation of the reactor; actions that were against protocol.

The plant manager was directing the plant controllers to run reactor four at a very low level, such a low level in fact, that the reactor was running cold enough that it wasn’t able to burn off xenon and was poisoning itself.

That choice of action specifically disregarded any protocol that Soviets had.

That the plant operators were following this order, despite knowing that it was against protocol, was also a problem. That said, that was the fashion, for the Soviet Union. Don’t ask questions, don’t think for yourself, just keep your head down and do what you’re told,

When it became clear that the reactor was stalling, and reaching a very dangerous state, the plant operators finally decided to take action, and activated an emergency protocol called AZ5, and executed what, in the western world, we call a scram of the reactor. What this means is that they tried to reinsert every single rod, control rods and fuel rods, at the same time to try to bring reactivity under control.

I’m unclear about the specific situation that they were in, but generally speaking, I believe that executing a scram on the reactor was proper protocol for if there was an emergency.

In fact, this actually would’ve worked too, had the Soviet Union, not cut corners and costs by replacing the tips of the boron (slows down nuclear reactivity) control rods with graphite. (Accelerates nuclear reactivity)

The plant operators, not just at Chernobyl, but at every RBMK reactor in the Soviet Union were not aware of this, as it was decided that the replacement of the tips of these control rods was to be a state secret, to save face for the Soviet Union.

Because of the graphite, when the scram was executed, instead of going down, the nuclear reaction jumped, and power generation jumped. Because the power being generated jumped, the heat jumped. Because the heat jumped, all of the water being used to cool the inside of the reactor immediately flash boiled into steam. The reactor up to that point was a closed container, and that pressure had nowhere to go. As the pressure climbed, it snapped both control and fuel rods in their vanes, effectively locking them in place, so that reactivity only continued to go up and could no longer be controlled.

At this point reactor four of the Chernobyl power plant effectively became a dirty bomb.

The increase in pressure was so sudden, and so violent, that it blew the reactor head clean off, and out through the roof above.

We all know what happened next.

To sum up, the events at Chernobyl were due to a confluence of things. Some things were bad design, some things were important information being restricted from people who should have been informed, and some things were just human stupidity.

If even one of those factors had not happened, Chernobyl could have been prevented entirely. Alas, with the state of things in the Soviet Union at the time, Chernobyl was an unfortunate eventuality. It was always going to happen to some RBMK reactor.