>With the EEW having been around for a while at that point, it seems obvious that there should have been an automated system to begin a graceful shutdown of the reactor when a nearby quake was detected.

Uh, just no. First, it was most powerful registered earthquake in Japan which means that reactor survived every previous one just fine

Second, it did shut down when it detected earthquake. The disaster didn't happen because it didn't start to shut down

The failure was because emergency power supply needed to cool the reactor during shutdown also failed due to tsunami.

Like, fuck, at least read wikipedia page before spewing bollocks