“Why was the plant not designed with better foresight?”
Ask the Japanese, they built it. They chose to run all of their emergency controls for the several plants through one site making them all vulnerable to a single failure.
“The answer is that none of them ever are”
Expertise garnered from watching The China Syndrome?
.
Garnered from watching more than a dozen plants in the US fail for foolish reasons.
I don’t believe that there is a single plant left up and running on the West coast.