Similar claims are often made after accidents, especially by people sympathetic to engineers an scientists (such as at HN). Given a large enough population, you can always find people who predict disaster. Every leader (of a large enough population) has to decide which predictions to trust and which not to; there isn't enough money and time in the world to listen to them all, and to perfect any machine - especially large, highly complex ones.

The question is not 'was this one prediction accurate?', but 'how reliable is that population of predictions?'

...and what lessons can we draw from this?

Trust your nuclear scientists/engineers because they know what they're doing and are, in fact, not playing god

That's always going to happen though.

The government doesn't always have attention and money to shower on nuclear plants.

So? Anything could have been prevented on hindsight.

It's not hindsight when someone warns you beforehand.

Given a large enough population, you can always in hindsight find someone who predicted the outcome.