The tsunami was the secondary cause, and believing that no-one could predict such a tsunami is misleading.

Proof: another nuclear plant was less distant from the tsunami and survived, because someone (Y. Hirai) foresaw it and could impose his views: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onagawa_Nuclear_Power_Plant#20...

The hard truth is: even a predictable cause can trigger a disaster. And many aren't predictable.

Fukushima is by many criteria a "lucky" case, as many reactors were properly shutdown when the wave came, operators reacted globally adequately...

The question isn't "is a disaster possible?" but "when, and of which magnitude?".

This patently insufficient ability to foresee also sheds a light towards the "we know that dangerous nuclear waste will not be a problem for anyone during the next 100000 years or so".

Renewables can do the trick without all those threats.

Every nuclear disaster is unique yet nobody is willing to bet on any of them being the last. Fukushima was also unique in that it caused coal usage to skyrocket in Japan - a problem Germany is not currently suffering from.

To me, the way to prove that something ISNT safe is to shout loudly about how safe it is and to absolutely refuse to shoulder the costs of anything going wrong.

This is what the nuclear industry does and the government backs them.

> radically unlikely

It's an island nation, and we're calling a tsunami "radically unlikely"? Given the time frames involved in cleaning up an event like what happened in Fukushima, once every 100 years is not very unlikely.

You could have replaced all nuclear power plants with new ones for the cost of the fukushima cleanup.

As always your theoretical modern designs that are safe are useless if you are still running power plants that are older than chernobyl.

In France the new nuclear reactors have been plagued by hardware issue, delays.. So no, it isn't 'easy' to predict the building costs, it's easy only when you're replicating an already existing reactor and only if it was built recently!