I'm just going off the reports I read about it, in which scientists who followed up on Chernobyl.
Of course, no radiation is good radiation, but they were saying that, very surprisingly, estimates were way off on how many people would die.
Only the clean-up crews, subjected to high doses, were in any real danger.
As I mentioned before, this largely came down to "estimates" drawn up by the USA after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These estimates, for low doses, seem to be way off. The chances of developing a fatal cancer from a low dose seems to be far less than expected.
If you blow a reactor up, you just scatter fuel rods around. It's not that dangerous. It's only if the reactor has a meltdown, then it becomes seriously dangerous. And the only reason so many people received high doses, is because they didn't have the right gear and didn't have enough crew rotations. The West would not have done it the same way.
Mind, I am not saying everything would be fine. It wouldn't. Just it wouldn't be as catastrophic as the media would claim.