It was hit by tsunami because it was built in a tsunami-prone, seismically vulnerable area. A "1 in 1000 year" tsunami hitting it in first 40 years of operation sounds like a planning and engineering failure, and is why people tend to be super sceptical about safe nuclear.
How many nuclear plants are there in the world? About 500 [0]. Years between Chernobyl and Fukushima? ~30.
I expect a 1 in 1500 year event to have happened to a nuclear reactor somewhere in the world in that time.
People are skeptical because they don't have a very good grasp of statistics. I may have mentioned something about that a few posts up. Somewhere in the world something is going horribly wrong. The world is a big place.
That being said; I think there were design decisions made around Fukushima. The engineers in the 70s didn't have the capabilities we enjoy now.
Nuclear power today is about 10% of overall power generation. Were it 100%, INES 7 catastrophes would be happening every 3 years. That's before you account for wars and low safety culture plaguing significant part of the world which does not operate nuclear currently.
Engineering in 1970s was overall solid and not that much behind on material science and control systems theory than today: they could get people to the Moon and back after all. Dismissing the catastrophes to that is a dangerous hubris.
> Nuclear power today is about 10% of overall power generation. Were it 100%, INES 7 catastrophes would be happening every 3 years.
Well, no. It would probably be 0 INES 7 catastrophes because none of the new reactors would be built using pre-1980s designs.
> Engineering in 1970s was overall solid...
There is no comparison between modern engineering and 1970s engineering. Was 1970s engineering good? Yes. That is your clue at how jaw-dropping modern engineering is in terms of capabilities.
There would be fewer old failure modes in new reactor designs. There would be other failure modes (some unknown at design stage) in the new designs. Concentrated energy gradient in nuclear power generation suggests any claim of inherent safety is wishful thinking.
> There is no comparison between modern engineering and 1970s engineering.
There absolutely is, and tech people simply don't appreciate how slow the pace of progress was outside semiconductors. Outside the CAD based process flow the differences in mechanical and civil engineering to what they were are minimal. There are hardly any materials (outside of some niche exotics like PEEK) used today that were unknown in 1970s.
I'm a mining engineer. I assure you that there is no comparison between modern and 1970s capabilities. The discipline lives right next to civil engineering. Nothing to do with semiconductors.
