It is clear that wherever a plant can be screwed up by humans, it is possible for a plant to be screwed up, because humans can make mistakes.
It appears that one of the problems at Fukushima was caused by humans doing the wrong thing as a result of misunderstood readings.
To the extent the newer facilities have better control limits and better presentation of information, such errors can be minimized. To the extent we have a better human control structure, such events can also be minimized. Note that human error was also a major factor in the BP oil spill.
Most of our nuclear reactors are self-cooling. So to the extent we don’t let the humans screw THAT up, it is much less likely to have a cooling loss such as the one a the very old Fukishima plant.
In this regard, we are much less safe because of the prohibitive costs of building new reactors, or upgrading old reactors. It is so expensive to make any major renovations that old plants are simply continued, rather than being replaced.
The scaremongers of Fukishima will only make this worse. It is already hard enough to decommission a plant because there is no place to put the reactor fuel because of the Democrats. But anything that discourages new, safe reactors will make us continue to use the old reactors past their original lifetimes.
BTW, I don’t think “unsinkable” became an unthinkable notion. Nobody would get on a Disney Cruise if they had posted warnings that “This ship could sink at any time”. People assume ships will never sink unless there is a catastrophic accident. Just as we assume any particular plane will NEVER crash, even as we know that occasionally one does.
The question is whether there is such a thing as an “unacceptable loss”. People will die because of Fukishima. Lives will be destroyed, land lost, a company will be ruined. Is that an acceptable loss for clean, relatively cheap electric power? We need to compare to the costs of other power, and we will likely find that Fukishima’s losses are much less than for other plants.
For example, even if there is a permanent exclusion zone around fukishima, it will be smaller than the land permanently lost to a hydroelectric plant; it might be less than the land lost to a solar or wind farm as well, depending on how big the exclusion zone is.
Will the negative health consequences of working at the plant outweigh the health damage from coal? The number of people killed running the plant — will it be greater than the number of people who die at traditional electric plants? Will the environmental impact be greater when 40 years of Fukishima is compared to 40 years of an oil-fired plant which belched noxious fumes for decades before it was upgraded?
Unfortunately, humans are notoriously “bad” at assessing risk. We apply a much lower threshold to “spectacular” risks vs ordinary risks. People will avoid going near Fukishima, but they will fly and get higher dosage of radiation. They will be scared of the couple of deaths, while they ignore the tens of thousands who die in car crashes.
That is a great example — people will drive rather than fly, even though driving is much more dangerous than flying. In part that is because people feel they have control over the risk of driving, while the risk of flying is completely out of their control.
Another good example — during the DC sniper incident, kids sports leagues shut down, and schools kept kids inside during the day. This to end a risk that was so small as to be immeasurable — a total of a dozen or so people killed out of 3 milliont.
Meanwhile, those same kids were still required to go to school every day, even though buses crash, parents crash their cars, and kids get hit by cars while walking to school. None of those risks were worth shutting down school. BTW, I’ll admit that I simply didn’t go to the gas stations near the freeways, after he shot someone in my town. It’s not like I drove up there anyway, but I had the same irrational fear.