You seem to suggest that the fact that Fukushima was not adequately prepared for this tsunami was human failure, presumably because they should have expected such a tsunami to occur.
If this is the case, then you can just as well argue that it was human failure that the towns in the affected areas flooded because of the tsunami. After all, if they expected such a tsunami to occur they could/should have built higher levees.
The way I see it, the deaths resulting from the Fukushima accident were just as much (or as little) caused by human failure as most of the other deaths related to the tsunami.
For your information, in France where we use nuclear energy a lot, we look for the most catastrophic events of the last 100 years to see how we protect our infrastructure.
The Japanese looked for the last 50, but there were a tsunami of similar height 85 years ago.
Also the local authority of nuclear security has made a few reports were they recommended to increase the height of the seawalls. Several times. Never followed.
And last but not least, the accident could have been prevented, but has been badly handled. With Japanese hiding information, not cooperating with trained international nuclear-firefighters, and minimizing the scale of the incident until the last minute. This is the biggest mistake of all, compromising lives, resources, ocean and earth...
How is it not a human failure ?
What is interesting is that there was actually a city that raised the sea walls to 16 meters in the area. The mayor of that city was actually sent to jail because it was a scam to siphon money to his brother in law who was in construction. I don't remember the details because it was on a TV program that I watched about a year ago, but unfortunately the mayor in question died a couple of years before the tsunami and never lived to see that his actions actually saved the city.
Speaking of the seawall height, there were, indeed, studies done that showed that under certain circumstances 15-18 meter high tsunamis could be generated in that area. This was disregarded. "Why", you ask.
Let me explain. I live by the sea in Japan. I can go to the sea side and climb up on the sea wall. It is 5 meters above sea level. I can walk along it all practically all the way to Tokyo (200 km away). The only places where it doesn't exist is where there are natural cliffs (which are not as prevalent as you might imagine). Every little stream that empties into the ocean has a 5 meter high metal sea gate that can be closed in the event of a tsunami. Where I live there is one at least every km or so.
The sea walls in Japan are already a miracle of engineering. You want to make them 20m high? Around the entire country? This is an insane notion.
To be honest, I will take the risk. I don't want to live in a jail where the only place I can see the ocean is from on top of a mountain.
I live in Sagara, Shizuoka (now merged with Makinohara). It is the most dangerous place in Japan to live for earthquakes because of the imminent Tokai earthquake (50 years overdue, unless it actually happened in WWII when the place was already destroyed and nobody had the ability to measure the big earthquake that happened then). 5% of the population is likely to die by all predictions.
Which means 95% will live. Terrible tragedy, but not worse than surrounding yourself in a 20m high jail IMHO.
Now, there were many human failures regarding the Fukushima disaster (like not having the correct connectors to power the pumps externally). Sea walls is not one of them.
Do a google search for "tetrapod japan images" to see what the beaches around here already look like. The Japanese government is not trying to avoid money on reducing the damage of tsunami. It seems like there should be a simple solution, but there isn't.
I am not a nuclear engineer and I don't have enough background to really say what the answer is. My guess is that they are set up right next to the sea so that they can do exactly what they did in Fukushima -- pump sea water into the reactor.
Naturally higher ground is actually hard to find near the sea (because the mountains are usually set back by about a kilometre from the sea). Also, if you perch yourself on a cliff next to the sea, then you are at a more serious risk of landslides during the many 6-7 magnitude earthquakes we have in Japan each year. With artificially higher ground, I suspect you would be at even more risk.
The other main reason for not putting a nuclear reactor on high ground is that in the event of a containment breach, the contaminated water will run downhill (in indescriminate directions). The placement in low ground next to the ocean may be the best place, environmentally, in the case of a disaster.
Again, I'm only guessing, but I'm sure if you ask someone who is trained in the field they can give you better answers.
I'm hoping that Japan will transition away from nuclear reactors in the middle term. There is enough geothermal potential to provide base load (though protecting the environment with all the earthquakes we have here is not trivial in that case either). Since Fukushima, the amount of solar panels being installed in my area is insane, so I'm hopeful that things will improve over the next 50 years or so.
(Having said all that, Hamaoka power plant, which is just down the road from me, is perched up on top of a cliff overlooking the sea ;-) ).
To be honest, I have often wondered how the powerplant survived at all. I guess it was high enough up and that only the generators got clobbered, but I haven't looked into it in detail.
And then start ignoring them when it proves to expensive to consider them all. Or extend the lifetime of the plant beyond what is advisable, because shutting down a nuclear plant takes a long time and is as expensive as running one, but you don't get power out of it, so those in charge are very tempted to extend, extend, extend... like Fukushima.
The problem at Fukushima wasn't a short-term loss of coolant; it was the long-term lack of backup cooling after the tsunami hit (by which point the reactor had already been shut down for about 45 minutes), because of poor siting of the backup generators and switchgear. The operators couldn't do anything about that, no matter what they did.
Poor placement of backup systems is critical to process continuity, but in case of BWR mostly irrelevant to actual nuclear safety as long as you are willing to just write off the reactor (as you should) in case of major accident.
I'm not sure the last part is true; as I understand it, there was a significant risk of a containment breach if decay heat removal was insufficient--not from the reactor cores themselves, but from the spent fuel pools.
I agree with you, though, that any attempt to save the reactor itself was doomed to failure once the tsunami hit and the backup cooling was taken out, so any actions taken toward that end were misguided.
1) They don't factor in the value of "background" material and over-emphasize the foreground.
2) They feel that in a "natural" state, they are in control of their fate (Azimov had much to say on this one, and the ending of "I, Robot" is quite illuminating).
Fukushima did not go as well as it hypothetically could. And yes, the nuclear contamination is a disaster.
But let's look at what happened because Fukushima was there:
- electricity was supplied to drive the devices that informed the public about the earthquake risk and how to escape it.
- electricity was generated (prior to the loss of the plant's capacity) that drove the infrastructure that people relied upon to escape the tsunami wave
I think that the question of how the Fukushima prefecture would have fared sans plant is a reasonable question. Because the absence of the dangerous technologies we rely upon is not a state of safety; it's a state of nature, and we build devices to escape the pure state of nature because we know by experience it's inherently somewhat hostile to human life.
Future plants on coastlines should be built with the lessons learned from Fukushima's failure-mode in mind. Saying Fukushima itself was a failure is actually a larger step than it appears. How many lives were saved prior to and leading up to the tsunami by the power the plant generated?
While I am not an expert,- this is evident from what I read about on the Fukushima topic in the past written by other investigators. From what I remember, the lost cooling capacity caused by overwhelmed backup system could have been prevented if the rushing water could not reach it. I think it was GE and whichever other participating bodies there at the time that made the engineering and budgeting decisions to design it that way. In an earthquake prone zone, with danger of tsunamis no less.
Thanks to Arkadiusz for posting what is an actual list of facts as they are today, not what is filtered by layers of communication and media relation.