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Comment by dorgo | Hacker News Reader

> they would have studied those accidents and developed methods to mitigate them.

So, eartchquakes and tsunamis were a new developement in japan. The engineers had never a chance to study them and develope methods to mitigate risks for nuclear plants?

If plane crashes would endanger whole countries or continents we would ban air traffic all together.

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Fukushima was actually preventable. There were other reactors in the Tsunami zone that were fine because they were designed for these magnitude events. The fact that Fukushima happened as it did was because engineers with knowledge on international standards were not let into the decision making process. If anything Fukushima is an argument about the dangers of allowing energy production to be controlled by a private company that will focus on its bottom line moreso than engineering best practices (this might ring familiar to people affected by PG&E wildfires). (1). That being said, fukushima still worked as intended and no radiation leaked out.

And plane crashes can and did endanger entire countries in the past, such as 9/11 where hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Afganistan civilians went on to die because of a plane crash in new york city. However, we responded to 9/11 by engineering better protocols, like installing a door lock to the pilots cabin and preventing the carrying on of certain blades. There were other times too when a plane crash threatened an entire country, such as when the soviet union shot down an airliner and caused a serious diplomatic incident as a result.

1. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2014.037...

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