I see your point, but I think the original point still stands - even if we take into account the shortcomings of Japanese business culture, what developed country is without its fatal flaws? In other countries, especially less developed ones, they might lack the negative stereotypes of not questioning superiority because they're too busy fighting worse stereotypes like greed, incompetence, or ignorance. What threshold of perfection does a country have to attain before it can be trusted to utilize nuclear power? And I would say Japan does set a pretty high bar when compared with most of the rest of the world.

In Japan they shut down each plant yearly for inspection. Everywhere else it's done on the refueling cycle. The plant I worked at was on a two year cycle so each year one of the two plants shut down for about an 8 week refuel/overhaul outage.

That's well and good, but an inspection is only as good as the inspectors and workers are honest and feel empowered to shut the whole deal down.

It's one thing to implement and andon cord, but it's quite another to get workers to actually use it.

'the Japanese, with their image of professionalism, smartness, ultra advanced technology, and total dedication to their job'

1 The plants were antiquated 1970's US GE equipment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_Nuclear_Powe...

2 Japanese business culture is very deferential and top down. The amount of lying and covers ups around the Fukushima disaster was and is horrifying. Having worked for Sony I can say that there is an awful lot of dead wood in Japanese class system culture just as there is in the English class system, and that is not a healthy way to run something potential deadly on a global scale. I'm on the fence about nuclear power largely because of the above. It's not the technology, it's human and bureaucratic fallibility and greed that is the weak link

That's fair enough but shouldn't you have the same hesitancy about say, solar panel production or coal mining or oil production or wind farm installation and maintenance? All of these can be just as deadly and potentially more polluting.