You obviously don't have an accurate understanding as to what actually went wrong with that reactor in Japan. That reactor was designed with a multiplely redundant emergency cooling system.
I'm impressed!
It was specificly designed to suffer an earthquake of a power of 9.0 on the Riecther scale within 20 miles or so of the epicenter.
Designed!
It was desgned to suffer through a tsunami. It was designed to suffer though a complete failure of grid power support, as well as total failure of all of the AC water pumps. What was never considered was the incredible odds that all of these things would happen in the same day.
Yes, I know: to collectivised Engineers the odds seem incredible. That the pools are still hanging around high above the ground must seem incredible to them as well.
It was a harsh lesson learned, and many heroic engineers and techs working for a private company lost some or all of their remaining lifespans in concerted efforts to save public lives.
Lesson learned? Hihiiiii! The nuclear industry is nothing private. It was military driven from the beginning. No private insurance company would ever insure this madness.
They learned nothing. In France, 80 % of the electric power comes from nuclear reactors. A black out of the hyper-fragile power grid (sun storm, revolution etc.) will be followed by armageddon. Nobody will cool the reactors and the fuel pools anymore, since the reactors need the power of each other to cool them, and in a revolution (question of when, but not of if) never ever.
Therefore, your heroic collectivist dreams rely on the functionality of the globalized hypercollective. I knew it: your are a collectivist hero by heart and soul.
It sucks to be that tech, when that crap happens at your plant; but just like joining the military, they knew what they signed up for. If you don't thik that there are equally heroic corporate employees of every other nuclear powerhouse in the world, then you don't really understand why these men and woman get paid the salaries that they do. But know that the nuclear industry knows that such a one in ten thousand odds event can happen, ...
Oh, a one in ten thousand odds event! 10'000 divided by 500 reactors worldwide = a one in 20 event. Therefore, we are enjoying such events every 20 years. Yeah, Chernobyl and now some 20 years later Fukushima, and between the 2 events some almost-disasters. I'm impressed by the incredible intelligence of these engineers.
...they are already reconsidering their own emergency cooling plans because reglatory agencies require them to and because they don't ever want to be the next set of guys to have to die to save humanity.
Regulatory agencies...., really funny.
For that matter, the complete breakdown of civil society is one of the most common emergency scenarios that nuke plant disaster planners have long considered, and one of the easiest for them to plan for.
Yes, planning is easy, but surviving is impossible with such planners. In a revolution, it is crystal clear that nobody will be able to maintain these 500 reactors worldwide anymore.
It's way harder to plan for a 35 foot high tsunami wave. Fukushima power plant had diesel powered pumps that could run underwater, and generators that could survive an earthquake; but not both at the same time.
And not one of the great sun eruptions at another time, which will destroy the communications systems, the transformers and the grid systems, and nobody will be able to restart it.
And furthermore, none of those failues would have mattered at all, had Fukushima not been involved in their once in a three year refueling cycle when the bovine fecal matter made contact with the rotating cooling device. The other reactors were all automaticly in emergency shutdown stage 60 seconds after the earthquake was detected, and never caused any problems; but that one (number 4, IIRC) was not set for automatic shutdown due to being involved in a fuel rod exchange that very week.
If and if and if and if ....
Fresh, hot fuel rods were waiting in the storage pool,
Now they are still waiting in hanging pools high above the ground in a building, which won't survive the next earthquake.
...while engineers and tech were running all over a damaged and dangerous reactor trying to get the emergency neutron sheild down into the remaining core, and everyone managed to forget about the storage pool. The water in the storage pool evaporated enough that the tops of the fuel rods were exposed to air, and then they caught on fire due to their own internal heat.
Incredible, these one in 20 years events.
It was not really a 'mealtdown' in any practical sense, but radioactive smoke is no small thing. To the best of my knowledge, Fukushima could still be in operation today, if the populist government had not halted all nuclear power in the nation, as teh damage to the reactor itself was not really significant. Nothing like Chernobel for example, or even Three Mile Island (which didn't actually release any radiation BTW, but did damage the reactor)
And they all lived happily ever after ...
