Yep, it did. And (brown)coal kills much more people and the dependence on Russian gas made the geopolitics much worse than any nuclear reactor ever would.
The chances of a Soviet leadership-induced meltdown like at a German nuclear reactor that is properly designed and maintained is laughable.
It is, however, extremely hard to film the slow killing of people by browncoal. It's easy to film a nuclear reactor incident.
I think we can agree that people are not in general making purely statistical decisions when it comes to what risks are acceptable and which ones are not.