Comment by XorNot

Except for Chernobyl clean up workers, no one lost their lives taking a deliberate risk in any other nuclear incident. And Chernobyl clean up workers didn't die within months either - in fact the story of their health outcomes is quite nuanced, but yes they most definitely took high risks.

In fact Chernobyl is incredibly badly remembered, because the firefighters who died responding to the initial blaze died of sepsis related to beta radiation burns from spending hours wearing their firefighting coats covered in radioactive dust.

Had they been removed promptly and hosed down, those people would've survived because they would not have received essentially a third degree burn over their entire body. And that's the point: they died of sepsis related complications, not any type of unique radiation damage and the Soviet doctors who treated them did get better at it once the protocols were established.