Well that is definitely a minority viewpoint. Chernobyl is widely considered to be a ridiculously bad design by modern standards. For one thing, it had no containment dome at all. For another, the design caused the reaction to speed up as the fuel got hotter. All modern designs do the opposite: as fuel gets hotter, the reaction slows.
For current production reactors, that's enough to buy time but not enough to completely prevent meltdown. Some more advanced reactors can't melt down, due to this effect. Pebble beds are one. Another is the Integral Fast Breeder, which we had working at the Argonne national laboratory back in the 90s. It was so safe, they shut down the cooling system entirely, twice, and each time the reaction just quietly stopped. The reactor was also designed to be proliferation-resistant.
If you're concerned about nuclear waste, fast breeders are the way to go. Instead of using one percent of the potential of the fuel, like current reactors do, they use it all. They eat nuclear waste and depleted uranium. Clinton was anti-nuclear and shut the project down, so now instead of using depleted uranium for fuel, we shoot it at people to secure oil supplies.
Personally, I'm not that concerned about the waste. From the book Physics for Future Presidents, page 176:
"Colorado, where much of the uranium is obtained, is a geologically active region, full of faults and fissures and mountains rising out of the prairie, and its surface rock contains about a billion tons of uranium. The radioactivity in this uranium is 20 times greater than the legal limit for Yucca Mountain, and it will take more than 13 billion years--not just a few hundred--for the radioactivity to drop by a factor of 10. Yet water that runs through, around, and over this radioactive rock is the source of the Colorado River, which is used for drinking water in much of the Wst, including Los Angeles and San Diego. And unlike the glass pellets that store the waste in Yucca Mountain, most of the uranium in the Colorado ground is water-soluble. Here is the absurd-sounding conclusion: if the Yucca Mountain facility were at full capacity and all the waste leaked out of its glass containment immediately and managed to reach groundwater, the danger would still be 20 times less than that currently posed by natural uranium leaching into the Colorado River."
Of course we're actually storing wastes on site. I'm not sure why the anti-nuclear people who shut down Yucca thought that was better. But it does have the advantage of leaving the fuel available for fast breeders.
