That's a really bad example, giving that this thing will poison the ocean for millennia to come and stopped short just on the brink of becoming the next Chernob

That's a really bad example, giving that this thing will poison the ocean for millennia to come and stopped short just on the brink of becoming the next Chernobyl. If things had just turned out slightly differently, the reactor core could have gone haywire and that would have been the end of it. As it is, this was just dumb luck. Nothing more. If anything, Fukushima has proven (if there was ever any doubt) that there is absolutely nothing, even a high tech nation like Japan can do to deal with a disaster like this. Exactly the opposite of what you claim.