Reactors need lots of water for cooling, so they're regularly placed at rivers. Rivers flood during melting season and storms. Storms also interrupt the grid occasionally. Due to climate change, these events are getting more common.
As a result, anywhere you can place reactors, you'll have to deal with situations where you have no grid connection, no backup power, no generators, and flooding, at unexpected times.
A nuclear reactor needs always, 24/7, forever power due to cooling. This isn't really compatible.
I think that is something we should expect to be the default and is a problem in maintenance as well. Leaky pipes and more are common problems for nuclear power plants. e.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/radioactive-leaks-found-at-75-o...
> Fukushima on the other hand is a better comparison. But on larger scales, such as Europe or the US, surely it must be possible to place the plants in areas that are not subject to such natural disasters that would threaten the safety of the reactors?
In the end it matters to massively overscale the safety for the location it is in, no matter where you put it. Including rigurous maintenance and checks of all of this. But those things will make it much more expensive.
And the Czernobyl design not only ignored a lot of safety knowledge the Sowjets had at that time, but took intentional shortcuts to be cheaper and make the fuel more accessible (supposedly for bomb production).
This is only comforting if we stopped operating "old and crappy" reactors. But overall, your comment seems to agree with my point, as you wrote:
> Tepco also refused to upgrade or improve several safety measures.
> ignored a lot of safety knowledge the Sowjets had at that time, but took intentional shortcuts to be cheaper and make the fuel more accessible
This the point I tried(, but not neccesarily succeded) to make: We should expect this kind of corner cutting and underfunding.
Because of nuclear physics (gamma energy levels, isotope half-life), it's very easy to identify when any contamination, even amounts that have no effect on human health, escape from a nuclear plant. Meanwhile, fossil fuel emissions (not just carbon-- soot and other particulates cause near-term health problems for humans) continue.
Chernobyl was underbudgetted in terms of safety. For instance no protective dome was places around the reactor housing as done in other countries. Add that to a suboptimal design to start with and sheer bad luck...
Fukushima on the other hand is a better comparison. But on larger scales, such as Europe or the US, surely it must be possible to place the plants in areas that are not subject to such natural disasters that would threaten the safety of the reactors?