Absolutely. This is what was intended. I think I said something similar earlier in this thread (or another).
Its sad when people die. But a few thousand deaths is not at the scale of significance to be modeled in Civ. It pales in comparison to car accidents or disease or battles. It is not the stuff of Empires.
A "realistic" implication of a meltdown to me would be to render 1-3 tiles in the city BFC permanently unworkable (0 tile yield, and their improvements destroyed forever). And maybe cause a health penalty for the nearby city (+0.5 unhealth per radioactive tile).
In game terms, Chernobyl is not a city. Its a town in the BFC of Kiev.
Though there *are* a few downtown nuclear plants in the former-Soviet bloc, most people aren't dumb enough to build their nuke plant right in their major population center.
So the area damaged by a catastrophic meltdown would not be the tile that the City is on.