TEPCO and Japan's NISA are not the most trustworthy or competent of organizations, they certainly have a lot of room for improvement. However, I think you're m

TEPCO and Japan's NISA are not the most trustworthy or competent of organizations, they certainly have a lot of room for improvement. However, I think you're misinterpreting the importance of the age of the Fukushima reactor design. Specifically the important point is that the extremely obsolete nature of that design means that its short-comings should have little to no bearing on the relative risk of building new nuclear power plants. Additionally, even with all the problems of Fukushima, many of which are avoidable, it's worth pointing out that those problems did not occur spontaneously. Somehow we've apparently forgotten about the 9.0 magnitude earthquake and 40 meter high tsunami which killed over 15,000 people while also causing severe damage to the Fukushima reactors. These are not usual operating circumstances. Somehow we give a pass to other technologies that have failed and caused injury to humans after being impacted by extreme natural disasters yet nuclear power must stand on its own. And yet even despite that and despite many many missteps in the response the Fukushima disaster has not pushed nuclear power into being less safe than any other base load power generation technology, even hydroelectric! That's almost astounding, but it cuts to the deep failures that humans tend to make when they attempt to judge relative risk of extremely dissimilar things (like flying vs. driving, rock climbing vs. eating cheeseburgers, or nuclear power vs. coal).