The question is what exactly you expected of it. You've taken one of the oldest and least intrinsically safe designs since chernobyl (at least compared to anyth

The question is what exactly you expected of it. You've taken one of the oldest and least intrinsically safe designs since chernobyl (at least compared to anything recent like a nice pebble bed/molten salt reactor), hit it with an earthquake, washed it away with a tsunami and blown it up with hydrogen gas explosions. And it's basically just that there, leaking a fairly small amount of radiation. Compare that to other objects that could cause environmental damage, like say an oil tanker or a chemical plant and try and compare it in similar circumstances. If you were to take say a standard pesticide factory, hit it with an earthquake, followed by a tsunami, followed by multiple explosions, I would be very surprised if it could keep the same level of containment of its material. To give you an example of what happens when a major chemical plant breaches, have a look at the Bhopal disaster. It isn't unreasonable to say that a major chemical breach is on the same scale as a small nuclear incident and as such I would consider the comparative reliability of nuclear plants to be rather remarkable and a testament to the engineering that goes into building them. Also interesting to note is how things have progressed. Remember that this reactor was built in 1971. If you look at a newer design, such as a pebble bed reactor you would notice that it exhibits passive safety, ie. that if you were to subject it to the kind of failures that have befallen the fukushima plant, it would simply fail safe until it could be fixed. Even in the event of a catastrophic failure of the reactor core, very little radiation would be emitted as the core itself is encased as a series of nearly indestructible silicon carbide pellets, and the preferred coolant very rarely absorbs neutrons. This would also mean that coolant leaks would be a lot less of a concern environmentally as the coolant would not be as radioactive. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor