I'm very sorry but I have to do this: some things are not really correct in your post. I'll get into a few of these things here, minus the physics of the explosion because I Don't Wanna. And the liquidation that wasn't immediate is not really an area of particular interest for me, so.
The test was fine. It was pretty much unnecessary but it was fine. They switched off some warning systems because they were running a test. They knew that some things were low, some were high, no need to get alarms going off every 10 seconds because of this.
They turned off the reactor's shutdown feature and lowered the power to the reactor.
This is not the gotcha moment everyone seems to think it is. They were quite literally shutting down the reactor that night, that was the planned outcome of the test. And, besides, that feature wouldn't even work in time to prevent the disaster. The lower power wasn't a problem, either. It just meant that the reactor was harder to control.
When the backup generators took too long to turn on, panic set in, and the reactor began to overheat. Then, somehow hit the AZ-5 button, which lowers all control rods into the reactor at once.
I am genuinely curious: where did you get this information from? This is very much not what happened at all. Nobody was panicking, all was going acording to plan. The power was slowly (SLOWLY) rising, about 1 MW a second, the AZ-5 is pressed. The test was complete, the mood in the control room was calm. Hell, there was actually a slight delay in the AZ-5 button being pressed, it was meant to be pressed some 20 seconds before that fateful 01:23:39 but the SIUR was waiting for the direct command from the NSB to do that. That wouldn't change absolutely nothing, for anyone wondering. Nothing in a place such as a reactor control room is pressed by accident.
The undertrained staff of the night shift were not aware of this.
This was absolutely not a staff issue. Nobody but the higher ups at the Kurchatov Institute, the designers and people alike knew. The operators simply weren't told. So yeah, they weren't aware. But you specifying untrained leads me to believe you think the case was different and they didn't know because they didn't have enough experience which is simply not true.
Two plant workers were killed instantly by either the force of the blast or from being hit by debris.
Valery Khodemchuk was never found. We don't actually know if he died instantly. But we can certainly hope he did. I'm assuming the second person that was killed instantly is Vladimir Shashenok. In this case, if 5pm is instantly then... sure.
Firefighters were called in, but they were not told the dangers of the radiation. Most died within a few months.
First of all: depends on who you'd ask. Some said they had no idea - I'm guessing these were the firefighters from the region as a whole, not necessarily the local ones. The NPP's firefighters knew, though. They were trained for this. They even had training the very day before the accident on the 5th or 6th unfinished block. Second of all: over 128 firefighters responded. Around 186 if we count the ones that arrived after 6am from Kiev. Only 6 of these 128 (/186) died in the following weeks. Less that 5% from the smaller numer is hardly most. Sure, some had long terms health issues that eventually led to their deaths but that's very much not the same as most died within a few months.
In Pripyat, the Amusement Park that had been scheduled to open the next day was hurriedly opened a day early to distract residents from the fact that the reactor was on fire.
The Amusement Park was meant to be opened on May Day - The Labour Day. Nobody needed to be distracted from anything. Pripyat's citizens were under the impression that nothing serious was going on. If they cared enough to know that something was going on, they could have observed that everyone was seemingly working to fix the situation. I'm sorry but the Ferris Wheel was not the carousel set up by the Nazis next to the Warsaw ghetto. The carousel that people were having fun on on the 25th of April in 1943 while a fire broke out during an uprising in there, as is described in Campo di Fiori. I don't know, maybe someone got too much inspiration from that but there are literally no solid sources when it comes to if it was working at all on that day, nobody was able to indefinitely recall or prove that it was.
It took 36 hours for Soviet Officials to finally begin to evacuate Pripyat, only after residents had begun to report nausea, dizziness, fatigue, vomiting, and headaches, all symptoms of radiation poisoning.
The buses begin taking people at 2pm on the 27th of April after an announcement was made at 1:10pm. It took that long because of internal conflicts between the Party commission. And random, everyday Pripyat residents didn't get sick. There was a handful of cases of people who were close to the NPP at the time of the explosion and that was it. This kind of reaction means an extremely hight dose, likely lethal, and people weren't, in fact, dying left and right.
A few weeks earlier, citizens were trained with gas masks in case there ever was an incident. Officials said that they didn't need them, as they didn't want to cause a panic.
Radiation doesn't care about gas masks. Unless you want to protect yourself specifically from inhaling radioactive particles - that is, from said particles getting into your airways and causing all kinds of damage, as was the case with quite a few of the people that suffered the worst cases of ARS - they would quite literally be completely useless. Apparently they're all lying around because, much later, they were looted for precious metals.
Another rather infamous object is "The Elephant's Foot" (...). Upon discovery, the sheer amount of radiation it gave off was enough to give you a fatal dose within about 90 seconds. Today, that's increased to about five minutes.
It was emitting 8,000 roentgen per hour, 2 roentgen a second. That means you'd get the fatal dose within 5 minutes then, not now. Now, it's mostly likely crumbled into dust and is emitting roentgen in the single digits. You're perhaps confusing the time typically referred to as the maximum allowable time for the liquidators working on the roof - 90 seconds - with the corium monstrosity.
The USSR finally admitted there had been a "very small” incident at Chernobyl, and was very reluctant to give the world information
At no point did anyone of any importance refer to it as a very small incident.
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