Fukushima wasn't that bad. Very little radiation was leaked and the max number of expected cancer cases expected based on conservative modeling is ~100, mostly of the treatable thyroid variety. Most of those people will likely die of other causes.

Chernobyl was just an idiotic design that no one outside of the USSR would have built after about 1954. Graphite piles are death traps, and not building a containment building is insane.

Fukushima as a plant was also asking for trouble: "the earthquake had also generated a tsunami 14 metres...swept over the plant's seawall" (c) Wikipedia. 14 metres is a joke for a country where 40 metre tsunamis happen.

It is amazing how this could be built not taking high waves into account.

This what happens when politicians control the placement of nuclear plants. The scientist and engineers picked a much better location for the plant, but were overridden, and a political favor moved the location.

The engineers mentioned they needed a large seawall to protect the plant from the frequent tsunamis, and were overridden because it cost too much.

Nuclear can be safe, but you have to keep politics out of it.

Yeah, and even that would have been fine if backup power in plant one hadn't been in the basement. The other, newer reactors had above ground backup power. Either a taller wall or a generator in a shed would have prevented the accident.

Well, part of it is that there is a lot of FUD about nuclear. The impact of Fukushima accident is a grand total of 0 deaths.

Extract from the Report of the UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation) of 2020 :

"Since the UNSCEAR 2013 Report no adverse health effects among Fukushima Prefecture residents have been documented that are directly attributable to radiation exposure from the FDNPS accident."

You can check the source here : https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/fukushima.html. (Be warned, it's full of jargon).

For the worst nuclear accident of this century, I would argue it's pretty good !

> But if I look around at the current state of affairs I would say it looks like we have started to walk backwards as a civilisation

If we talking about technology development than each technology has ups and downs but very often there is a gradual improvement, peak and then slow of fast fall.

I don't think nuclear energy passed its peak and degrades. Newer reactors are better than 50 years ago. The only think which can be worse - ever increasing amount of regulations added without cost-benefit analysis. Safety by any price is a dubious goal because the price may be too high to pay.