[Rei-Lin]

Well the containment walls were designed at the time to take on at least an 8.0 size earthquake and they took a 9 and stayed standing (of course damaged) and then ate a giant wave of water on top of that and still stayed up. The only reason all of this crap went South is because the design of the plant put the spent fuel pool on the roof and that the backup diesel generators were in the basement of the containment building, so they flooded and wouldn't run. There's a plant here in the U.S. that has the exact same design but they were lucky and suffered flooding of their diesel generators during construction and thought "Oh, well this is a bad idea to put these life saving generators in the one place they can drown!" and so they moved them further out away from the plant and put them on higher ground.

My job is to go from Nuclear Plant to nuclear plant around the country testing the safety related systems that keep these plants running, and these things are designed far beyond reason when it come to safety of the public. Even systems not designed for safety related accidents have held up long enough to reduce the radioactivity as much as possible before burning out (TMI's release was reduced significantly due to non-safety related systems kicking in). So yeah what happend at Fukushima was something nobody could have really planned to happen no more than they planned for the Titanic to sink. You build the best you think you can, add 10% more on top and hope it's enough. Not saying any of this stuff is perfect but from my perspective, I'd be more worried about plant accidents due to the people working there than the actual plant's themselves having problems.

In fact I'm sitting here at a hotel in Huntsville, Alabama waiting for these idiots to fix a LIGHT BULB on the unit I need to test because a guy decided to change it out (it wasn't burnt out but was "glowing brighter" than he thought it should be), and he made the unit shut off while trying to change it. So now the unit is broken, and they have less than 4 days to fix it or their plant shuts down. So not only am I delayed going home to enjoy the holiday weekend with my family, there's nothing I can do until they fix it so I can test it. It's bullshit and such is the life of Nuclear Power. Safe energy in the hands of total morons.