I suspect that one of the biggest problems is a human one. That is, the most knowledgeable experts, who are in charge and should be, are also under the constant

I suspect that one of the biggest problems is a human one. That is, the most knowledgeable experts, who are in charge and should be, are also under the constant impression that the safety of nuclear power plants is unfairly criticized. When you must always be in defense mode, do you begin to internalize that perspective almost as though it is a debating position? During the Fukishima disaster there were some of the worst arguments immaginable given by nuclear energy proponents. For example: you can't expect the engineers to have designed for such a massive earthquake and a tsunami! If you can enumerate a thousand things that happen about once a thousand years, you can reasonably expect about one of them to occur in the next year, but it can be difficult to nme them unless you are in the right frame of mind. How many natural disasters occur every decade that we are "shocked" could ever happen? My impression is that the engineers behind Fukishima were not actually insane, and did try to build a plant that would survive an earthquake and a tsunami, but their models were incorrect about the likelihood of different wave heights, and perhaps even more accurately, the cooling system simply had insufficient redundancies. Finally, what I really feel most discussions lose sight of is that both Chernobyl and Fukishima were very far from being worst case disasters. In both disasters once an uncommon set of events set them in motion, an also uncommon amount of heroism and ingenuity prevented the disasters from spiralling further out of control. I don't mean to say so much that it is unimaginable that people would risk their lives to save others in their own towns, so much as to say that that was the last line of defense, and it was necessary to use it, contrary to what I what the models should rely on. What if instead, the on site engineers had been as reliable as the New Orleans police during hurricane Katrina?