I can't point to a "similar legacy of birth defects suffering and eviction from the land" in conjunction with any other kind of disaster, up to and including earthquakes causing millions of deaths.
The 'league' of a disaster in your head is not an important metric; the oil spill is responsible for far more environmental contamination, food supply reduction, and long term ecological damage than Chernobyl.
Coal plants kill more people every year without even being called 'disasters' - the birth defects caused by the radiation being put in the atmosphere by those plants is distributed over a far larger area, but it's way out of the 'Chernobyl league'.
You are attributing extra importance to Chernobyl because it causes an unusual type of localized damage, but it never caused that much of it.
For another stark example, compare them to the damage done by properly-operating coal plants every year. Mining coal, just mining it, directly kills more people every year (on the order of 10k) than Chernobyl will. Then there are the various mining-related lung diseases. Then there are the 10–20k (in the US alone, depending on which estimate you believe) deaths/year from the pollution.
People tend to rate dangers they don't understand very well much higher than those they do.