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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Just keep the backup diesel generators far, far above the tsunami zone and all will be well. There were repeated recommendations (that were ignored) to move the backup generators at Fukushima Daiichi to a significantly higher elevation but management decided it wasn't a priority based on known threats. After March 2011 I don't think it will take much persuasion to implement such safety recommendations.

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Or don't turn of the reactor so the reactor can power itself.

Or switch to modern reactor designs that don’t require active cooling -> https://www.ne.anl.gov/About/hn/logos-winter02-psr.shtml

Well of course ...

As if better diesel generator placement alone would have substantially prevented the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster...

Actually, that's exactly what would have happened. The plant would have shutdown without any major incident/release of radiation/contamination.

> Actually, that's exactly what would have happened. The plant would have shutdown without any major incident/release of radiation/contamination.

Weren't the pumps and cooling/control systems damaged as well?

Not so far as I can tell from the various reports I've read.

"Unit 5 was undergoing pressure testing on the day the earthquake occurred. The unit lost all AC power due to flooding of seawater pumps and power panels. As a consequence, lighting and AC-powered instrumentation on the Unit 5 side of the common control room were inoperable; the Unit 5 side of the control room went dark after the batteries for emergency lighting were depleted" (emphasis mine)

From: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK253938/

Which is quite a read in general, and clearly the diesel generators flooding was a major component of the disaster. But there was a lot that went wrong in addition to that, it's a real mess.

That's the control room, though. Reactor 5 was offline, but fueled and never exploded. Unit 4 was the big problem.

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