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Just keep the backup diesel generators far, far above the tsunami zone and all will be well. There were repeated recommendations (that were ignored) to move the backup generators at Fukushima Daiichi to a significantly higher elevation but management decided it wasn't a priority based on known threats. After March 2011 I don't think it will take much persuasion to implement such safety recommendations.
Or don't turn of the reactor so the reactor can power itself.
Or switch to modern reactor designs that don’t require active cooling -> https://www.ne.anl.gov/About/hn/logos-winter02-psr.shtml
Well of course ...
As if better diesel generator placement alone would have substantially prevented the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster...
Actually, that's exactly what would have happened. The plant would have shutdown without any major incident/release of radiation/contamination.
> Actually, that's exactly what would have happened. The plant would have shutdown without any major incident/release of radiation/contamination.

Weren't the pumps and cooling/control systems damaged as well?

Not so far as I can tell from the various reports I've read.
"Unit 5 was undergoing pressure testing on the day the earthquake occurred. The unit lost all AC power due to flooding of seawater pumps and power panels. As a consequence, lighting and AC-powered instrumentation on the Unit 5 side of the common control room were inoperable; the Unit 5 side of the control room went dark after the batteries for emergency lighting were depleted" (emphasis mine)

From: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/

Which is quite a read in general, and clearly the diesel generators flooding was a major component of the disaster. But there was a lot that went wrong in addition to that, it's a real mess.

That's the control room, though. Reactor 5 was offline, but fueled and never exploded. Unit 4 was the big problem.
I legitimately have no idea why there is such antipathy towards nuclear energy lately.

It produces very little waste, it can be stored on site, and has almost no pollution (besides heat waste and the used radioactive materials).

I'm pretty pro nuclear energy, but it's pretty obvious why. Fukushima is still in recent memory. Proliferation concerns are pretty close to the forefront vis-a-vis Iran and North Korea. Solar and wind are quickly getting less expensive, and nuclear is (albeit slowly) becoming more expensive. This is all convincing many people that it just isn't worth the trouble.

I don't think those people are correct, but I do acknowledge that pro-nuclear folks have a bit of an uphill climb convincing them.

Nuclear’s expense is almost entirely artificial/regulatory in nature, think simpler and safer modern reactor designs reduce a lot of the expense.

The construction and maintenance and integration of nuclear waste storage facilities is also much simpler and more proven than the construction and maintenance and integration of battery farms on the scale needed to meet grid demands.

I don't understand why people don't want more proliferation. It would make world safer. Just imagine if Afganistan and Iraq could have delivered a nuke to USA soil.
I can tell you why: when I was growing up in the US I was constantly bombarded with the "radiation bad! corrupting your life essence" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Shadow_Etched_in_Stone)

I think those three things, along with War Games, solidified the idea in multiple generations that nuclear was bad (specifically: causes cancer and disrupts infrastructure). The Day After had an insane impact, I remember everybody coming to school (I was 10) the day after sort of shocked.

What can I say, it's a dramatic looking risk that human brains see as much larger than the cumulative damage of living next to a freeway for 10 years.

Moreover, the partially spent fuel* can be reprocessed to the point of getting more than 99% of the potential energy out of it, and then chemically processed into a safe and stable state beyond that -- if only such processing was permitted everywhere Uranium is being used to make heat for generating electricity.

*calling partially spent fuel "waste" ignores that current policy only allows for 5 to 10% of the energy in a unit of uranium fuel to be extracted and used. It's not "waste" until all of the usable fuel has been extracted through recycling.

Reprocessing is generally expensive, poses a substantial proliferation risk, and necessitates transport of spent fuel to reprocessing plants which is way less safe than on-site storage. While it's fine for a country like France which is already a nuclear weapons state, has the wealth and technological capability to carry out reprocessing, and a strong rule of law to make sure everything is done right; for most of the world reprocessing would not be done in practice, and you wouldn't really want it to be done. Nuclear waste is simply not a problem in need of a solution.
Right or wrong ,the Fukushima incident was a traumatic event for the world in terms of how nuclear energy is viewed. I think people are finally recovering from that.
Because a vote for a GW of new nuclear is a vote against removing 5GW of fossil fuels now and a vote against removing 4-9GW of fossil fuels later.

New nuclear -- outside of Chinese built, and if you believe them the plants russia builds to make other countries dependent on them -- is over $10/W. Solar is edging 30c/watt peak. This is <$2/W net in many areas.

Nuclear still needs backup power and it's not online for a decade or two. In that time solar will have paid itself back 1-2 times and will still have useful capacity. So you get 5W net now and 5-10W net before opening for 1W net of nuclear. The nuclear will then be not economically viable to keep open at $10-$20/MWh let alone pay itself back.

I'd much rather run all the gas peakers 60% of the time now (the shoulders still produce 1x energy when peak is 5x), then switch them all over to green hydrogen or ammonia in ten years (or rather do it gradually) than turn 10% of them off in ten years for 60-90% of the time.

Two reasons:

1) There are people out there inundated with misinformation, and who's knowledge of nuclear energy otherwise comes from The Simpsons. They think nuclear plants will explode like a bomb and that the waste can't be processed and will poison the Earth for thousands of years.

2) There's a subset politicians who aren't actually looking for solutions to carbon-free energy, but have hijacked the green energy movement to force a "societal transformation". I won't speculate on this particular conspiracy, but everyone from the oil companies, to China and Russia stand to gain if the West is not able to produce enough energy to heat homes, run factories, etc. The gas crisis in Europe is only a preview of the next few decades if we don't come up with real solutions.

> I legitimately have no idea why there is such antipathy towards nuclear energy lately.

Mismanagement and greed. Again, and again, and again. Fukushima was a good example, so was three mile island. There was nothing learned from these incidents that was surprising, or not known before. The HN crowd is good at looking at things from an idealistic, theoretical angle, ignoring reality.

There are a couple hundred nuclear power plants operating right now, and have been operating for decades. It's a stellar track record to have only 3 big incidents in over half a century, of which the only major one was also a really dumb outlier. All the nuclear incidents have harmed fewer people coal power plants do every year.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

The Bhopal disaster was much deadlier than all nuclear incidents, but we've not used it as an argument that production of pesticides can't be done safely.

The cleanup from Fukushima is going to cost roughly a trillion dollars.. that's a pretty big hiccup. I wouldn't be surprised if the actual cost of cleaning up Chernobyl was in the same order of magnitude. Humans are terrible at measuring the true cost and likelihood of statistically rare events.
Maybe we should just treat nuclear like coal where we don't bother to cleanup the radiation.
Mismanagement and greed are everywhere though. Coal plants don't have to dump CO2 and toxic chemicals into the atmosphere in massive quantities, but foregoing scrubbers and carbon capture saves money. Solar panels can be recycled reducing both pollution from manufacturing and disposal, but throwing them in landfills saves money. Falls from great heights maintaining windfarms can be avoided with proper safety equipment and training, but that costs money. Dams can be prevented from bursting with proper inspections, but that costs money.

The difference though is where coal kills many tens of thousands per year and a single dam burst typically has a death toll in the hundreds, the worst accident at a nuclear power plant this century has had 1 death attributed to it. More people have died from building collapses in the past 2 years than from nuclear power over its entire history.

Nuclear power is just fundamentally a technology where it is really difficult for mismangagement and greed to produce harm. It takes a lot of bad decisions and bad luck to get any substantial quantity of nuclear material anywhere near potential victims, the wider the affected area, the less potent the threat, and simply leaving the area after the accident is an effective defense.

Pretty much the only way to get substantial casualties from nuclear power is to deliberately disable safety features, blow up a reactor, prevent people from evacuating or taking other precautions for an extended period of time while actively suppressing information, and forcing hundreds of thousands of poorly trained and equipped people into the still burning reactor building and not letting them out before they've gotten far more than a safe dose. If you live in a place where that level of mismanagement is possible, you probably have bigger problems.

> There was nothing learned from these incidents that was surprising, or not known before.

You seem to have completely forgotten how events at Fukushima unraveled, or perhaps didn't follow them at the time. Watching CNN and other news outlets it was almost farcical: they'd put on world experts in nuclear engineering (legitimate experts, mind you, not science reporters or policy pundits) who would claim that event X (like a hydrogen leak) was so statistically improbable to the point of impossibility, then some hours later event X happens. Wash, rinse, repeat. It was all the more absurd because they clearly weren't updating their priors, so to speak, regarding the soundness and confidence of engineering analyses as events unfolded.

All the nuclear industry's statistical modeling techniques turned out to be crap. The fact it was an ancient BWR is irrelevant as that's what the engineers were modeling--engineer interviewees were basing their opinions on specific analyses of Fukushima and similar, contemporaneous designs. OTOH, it stands to reason that our statistical risk modeling for most other endeavors (maybe excepting some well worn areas, like commercial aviation) is also crap, so nuclear isn't likely exceptional in this regard. And we have about 80 years of solid experience building and running nuclear reactors, with quite a few meltdowns, not to mention many other incidents, and excepting Chernobyl outcomes have fallen well within the range of the risks and outcomes we deal with everyday in many other industries, and far short of the nightmares peddled by nuclear opponents.

Yep and my argument still stands. Those "could never happen" things are now firmly put into the "well that was a one in a million thing, don't need to bother" drawer. Earthquake and tsunami? Pffffft, not over here. Stupid Japan!
The reality where these 'HUGE FAILURES' killed essentially no people? Yeah we are really hiding from that reality.
The fact that nuclear proponents always need to compare to coal to make it look attractive, and only consider immediate deaths as counting in case of nuclear already says it all. By that measure, nobody has died from pollution from coal power plants either. Where's the hard evidence? All just coincidence and handwavy assumptions! It's from cars!

And as said, nobody has suggested replacing nuclear with coal, still most of the replies argue against that straw man.

No idea what you are talking about, I assume you are one of those people who has some delusional level of assumption about how many people radiation has killed.

> Where's the hard evidence?

The countless studies done on the topic that shows nuclear is incredibly safe, admits almost no CO2 and has very few other harmful emissions.

It's great! Except for those used radioactive materials taking hundreds of years to become safe, and a documented failure of modern human society to handle long-term problems, and especially to maintain a culture of safety longer than a few decades. And except for reactor failures rendering large chunks of land uninhabitable for decades.

When I started off as a developer, I would routinely forget to check for null pointers, because my underlying assumption was that nobody would pass a null pointer. Years later, and now my underlying assumption is: if it can happen, it will. I assume my functions will be given bad input. Likewise, I assume there will be catastrophic nuclear failures and failures in storing the waste. (For instance, look at the bad incentives that PG&E gets and how they respond, with the result that PG&E equipment starts a lot of fires. Would you want PG&E running nuclear power plants with the current culture?) Am I willing to live with those? Well, it's a hard sell.

The interesting thing behind nuclear is that everyone is very aware of the dangers it can externalize, while for alternative base load power generation the damages caused by external costs are often downplayed and ignored.

Coal ash for example is much more radioactive (around 100x more) that your average nuclear power plant. But we ignore it because it's released in the air and "vanishes", a external cost.

CO2 and several other pollutants currently released by non-nuclear base load power generation takes way more that "hundreds of years to become safe" in the amounts and rates that human beings are currently throwing it in the atmosphere. But we ignore it because it's released in the air and "vanishes", a external cost.

There is huge antipathy toward nuclear power because embracing it solves problems for which it is politically inconvenient for there to be solutions