While these are real risks, it's worth pointing out two things:
- This wasn't just "a single Tsunami", it was the Tsunami resulting from the 4th largest earthquake ever recorded happening just a few hundred km away.
- The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that.
The effects of the disaster are absolutely terrible, and we should definitely make sure it doesn't happen again - but we should also not ignore that more modern plants don't have the same design flaws, and that events with enough destructive force to shift the entire planet on its axis by 10-25cm are not common (and if they become so, we have additional problems).
> The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that.
That's the point, though, isn't it? One of the richest and most developed nations failed to decommission the plant in a timely manner, even under excellent conditions, in order to save costs. It's not the technology that's the problem.
There's a circular problem here, though: anti-nuclear activists block development and deployment of new technologies and plants, then complain that everything's old and outdated. The cost of nuclear has to include all the decommissioning costs while Coal and Hydro get to externalise their major environmental costs.
I understand that single incidents are more visible than long-term low-level harm. But as a civilisation we really aren't paying enough attention to the overall cost of everything that's not nuclear.
Or, anti-nuclear activism would be as ineffective as most other activism if nuclear actually made economic sense. Nuclear's economic fragility renders it vulnerable to external negative influences.
I don't think a lot of people realize just how old the power plant actually was; it went online a year before Chernobyl even started construction, and it's own construction started when the Soviets we're still winning the space race.
- This wasn't just "a single Tsunami", it was the Tsunami resulting from the 4th largest earthquake ever recorded happening just a few hundred km away.
- The design of the plant was really old - construction began only 33 years after the death of Marie Curie, and the design was older than that.
The effects of the disaster are absolutely terrible, and we should definitely make sure it doesn't happen again - but we should also not ignore that more modern plants don't have the same design flaws, and that events with enough destructive force to shift the entire planet on its axis by 10-25cm are not common (and if they become so, we have additional problems).