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Comment by petre | Hacker News Reader

The over regulation is there becaused the Soviets have shown us what under regulation, disregard for safety and zealotry can lead to.

Even Japan managed to screw up. Yes, it took a 9 Richter scale earthquake and a tsunami, plus some mistakes that were made during development.

Passive safety works just fine, but it's expensive to build huge water tanks and containers that could withstand 9/11 type of events.

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You left out the culture of borderline malfeasance on the utility's part and the failure to aggressively pursue that culture on the regulator's part.

Anyway if the fine print were risk of catastrophic failure in the event of a >9.0 earthquake I think that would be acceptable (and I think a lot of people would agree with me) depending on the geography where it was to be built.

How could japan have made that powerplant tsunami proof? Put the emergency generators on a pontoon or on a inland moumountain?

The same way anyone else avoids flooding: by building it on slightly higher ground.

put some generators on roof. Generator placement in Jp was based on BWRs placement in US - underground, which is sane considering tornados and stuff. But it wasnt adapted there

the cost problem is lost experience to build stuff. It's not like berlins airport is so expensive because of new whistles. Many western nations forgot to build. Japanese ABWR has a lower core damage frequency vs french EPR yet EPR took 20y and ABWR - 4

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