Western countries have spent many billions to secure the nuclear reactors of rotten USSR / Russian submarines which were endangering the baltic sea and also the Soviet RBMK-1000 reactor, which was causing the chernobyl disaster...
> Russia has a lot of uninhabited space
Nuclear installations are not in uninhabited space. For example the still operating (!) RMBK-style reactors are not that far away from major cities.
West had the money and the will, I think that was a dollar well spent.
US irradiated large areas of Pacific Ocean and atmosphere (US) with its testing program, harming people living there and contaminating whole world with radioactive isotopes. UK dumped radioactive waste in barrels into Atlantic ocean, has bad record on nuclear safety (Windscale accidents) and continues to run old nuclear power plant that does not pass old safety tests, so they make the test less and less restrictive [1].
The lax approach to safety has been observed on all sides. It has to improve but it is no reason to stop development of nuclear power.
Soviet-build power plants near cities aren't as bad as people think, if run safely by competent people. Chernobyl was a preventable disaster, not solely due to technology, but mainly due to incompetence and dysfunctional society. Also, the disaster wasn't as bad as people think. Few people died when you compare to other industrial accidents.
The really badly polluted installations in Russia are the military/research ones in restricted areas - Mayak, Lake Karachay.
> Russia has a lot of uninhabited space
Nuclear installations are not in uninhabited space. For example the still operating (!) RMBK-style reactors are not that far away from major cities.