This is a really good point - what measure of assurance do we (or, rather, the Japanese public) have that Japanese government officials and power company execs won't make the same mistakes again? Have any of the responsible parties been penalized at all?

Even if the technology advances, if the problem was the people last time, technology alone won't be enough.

I don't know about individuals in the government, but the government was held liable for some amount (seemingly <$10MM)[0][1] and top company executives were fined tens of billions[2].

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/17/japanese-gover...

[1] https://archive.vn/UnavD

[2] https://www.hazardexonthenet.net/article/191735/Former-Fukus...

Before the accident, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, who promotes nuclear, also did regulation. It shouldn't be. After the accident, Nuclear Regulation Authority was made. They inspect nuclear plants strictly so some plants is stopped despite energy company want to operate.

Your first two paragraphs seem to contradict each other. I guess I disagree with the first and agree with the second.

If you're going to build a plant that requires active backup cooling in a tsunami zone then you should protect your backup cooling system from tsunamis.

It's ok to build nuclear fission reactors in challenging locations. We have many that run underwater and a few dozen that run in outer space. We ran one under the ice sheet of Greenland and one in Antarctica. As you say, you just gotta build the necessary infrastructure.

There have been no nuke reactors in space. (RTG does not count.) The ones in Antarctica and Greenland were notable failures.

We don't have any currently operating nuclear reactors in space right now but there were quite a few in the past - a couple test satellites from the US and a couple dozen active radar satellites for ship hunting from the USSR:

https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/us-a.htm

While none are operational right now, the highly radioactive reactors cores that didn't burn up over Canada by accident do remain a reasonably stable disposal orbit today. :-)

Conceded, a few were operated by USSR. The one that crashed in Canada generated quite a fuss, for reasons.

The film safe from Skylab that crashed in Australia made less.

Long term, we will certainly need nuclear reactors in space - possibly not necessarily in Earth/Luna space that much, but already on Mars and especially the Asteroid Belt solar panel are really becoming too heavy to provide any useful power.

Thankfully reactors in space have a lot of benefits compared to terrestrial use - ships and space stations can use the so called shadow-shield to protect the ship/station in its shadow and just let the radiation go into the void of space in all other direction. Makes docking a bit tricky as well as running multiple reactors (you need to take neutron cross-propagation into account), but should be still doable.

For surface or asteroid stations - there shouldby plenty of mass for any shielding and no biosphere to contaminate or possibly not even any hydrosphere or atmosphere to spread radioactive particles - on the other hand, this also makes cooling harder.

Nukes in space offer myriad opportunities not practical on Earth. Lofting them directly from Earth is a tricky matter. I believe it could be done safely, but I know many never will.

On Titan, all you need is a naked pile in a gore-tex sleeve with a wind turbine at the top, catching convection. Or maybe plunge it into a methane sea and drive a wind turbine from the boil-off. No need for cooling.

On orbit or on an airless body, a naked pile at the end of a long boom can be allowed to heat to a fierce glow. Photovoltaics ranged around it, at a distance, produce power directly. Again, no need for cooling.

Indeed! That's why even though renewables now do often make more sense than nuclear plants, I'm worried about all the know how and industrial base possibly being lost, as that might slow us down as we move further into space.

BTW, there is a recently release grand-strategy game called Terra Invicta that gets it right - the same solar panel module that gives you 40 power units in LEO (or 260 at Mercury!) will produce just 3 power units at Ceres. So its all fission, followed by various fusion designs for any stations further from the sun than Earth/Luna & for basically all ships.

BTW, as for launching reactors into space - I think that at least the fuel elements will have to be launched for quite a while, the industrial base required for nuclear fuel refining and fuel assembly fabrication is just too massive for early deployment space-side. Lot of other stuff - dirt for shielding, coolant, possibly even some primitive radiators - could likely be made in space relatively quickly.

Still, nuclear fuel that has not yet been through a reactor is just a bunch of toxic heavy metal - not ideal if it burns s up, but possibly quite a bit better than plutonium from an RTG. Also being dense and quite small in volume, it could very well be shipped in a big ball of ablative shielding, just in case.

Loss of knowhow for terrestrial plant construction and operation doesn't worry me, because conditions and designs for uses in space are completely different. You are better off with people who are completely free of all the assumptions embodied in old designs.

Solar are wind are also increasingly unreliable due to the same extreme weather events. It is truly mind boggling how easily all legitimate criticism of wind and solar are brushed aside by the belief that they are the future.

With changing weather patterns, wind turbines are exposed to more ice events - events during cold weather that cause the shutdown of hundreds of wind farms. And no, i am not referring to wind turbines being affected by the cold, this is specifically wind turbines being affected by temperatures around freezing where ice forms. And what of long periods where winds speeds are too low across half a continent - a la the UK and western europe very recently? Same with solar - the world’s largest power grids are mostly not tropical.

There will likely come a future where continents are powered by wind and solar, but that future is not tomorrow nor is it in ten years time. In the meantime, we continue to hurtle towards a climate disaster while quibbling about the problems of nuclear power - a technology that has the potential to get us to that sustainable future.

Fair point. I hope they can resolve the systemic issues.

Just so we're clear though, the location itself isn't inherently a problem as far as I know. There was in fact a power plant closer to the epicenter of the disaster that survived just fine, which is pretty impressive given how cataclysmic of an event it was.

That one survived solely because one man put his career on the line, over and over, ensuring that it would. Depending on such devotion is not sustainable.

There is no possibility that any new construction would observe the same standards as that engineer. It might try, but management would overrule it.