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Comment by northwest65 | Hacker News Reader

Think of it as a 3m tall bulldozer the width of the country with effectively unlimited pushing power. Watch some videos of the Japan tsunami, it's basically an unstoppable force that gobbles up everything in it's path. Very uncool.

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It's generally very bad, but it also depends on the shoreline. If your city is on the coast at sea level with no real barrier, it's devastating. If there's a big cliff and everything is at higher elevation, you can ignore it.

Unfortunately, people tend to build settlements at sea level.

We should set up some stone monuments to delineate the high water mark, for future generations.

Same but different, there's an old town near a lake that suffered a devastating flood way back in its history. The downtown area has markers on the buildings that show the high water mark for the flood.

The Japanese have those. A lot of the monuments are hidden in the forest in the hills above the coastal villages...

That's what parent poster was referring to. They have high tide markers showing where tsunamis have reached, and then in the past 50-100 years people started saying "Waves Of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist" and building closer to the shoreline.

Consider for instance this place

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Diablo_Canyon_Po...

which is on top of a high bluff thus much more secure than the Fukushima NPP.

Unfortunately, that power plant is very close to two fault lines, and they didn't even know when they built it, so it's questionable how well it'll withstand an earthquake.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant

They increased the anticipated seismic loads and also reinforced the structure accordingly. I don’t think any NPP has been scrutinized to the extent that Diablo has been.

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