Great contemporaneous document with excellent diagrams.<p>The substantive points they made (as I see it) are that CANDU is a water moderated Reactor with fully computerised control rods and The RMBK is a graphite moderated Reactor which at the time depended on partially manual control rods. The CANDU quenches from full power in about 1/4 of the time, and the containment is completely different.<p>I guess you could argue the fully automated control rod thing has risks, but the key point of this paper is, whatever the risks of CANDU are, they mostly aren't structurally, mechanically or even in its nuclear physics the same risks as Chernobyl.<p>The shared risk would be people. The crew at Chernobyl were hot dogging. Chernobyl was a kind-of non sealed structurally weaker containment. It depended on its mass in ways which were weak under a structural explosion and hear. The containment for a CANDU a shown is a sealed unit, the explosion risk was less presumably because of the self quenching nature of the design but there was in effect a building around the containment where in the RMBK design the building was the containment.