one argument that was repeated over and over by pro fission folks was that an accident like chernobyl could not happen in a "good" country like france, german or japan. seening how one of the most technologicaly advanced countries suffered a contaminating incident that is comparable on scale with chernobyl was a shock to most germans and blew the mentioned agument away. if you were old enough to remember not being allowed to go outside as a child, to see your playgrounds demolished and the sand exchanged, you may be thinking differently about it. for decades it wasnt safe to collect mushrooms in the woods, something germans are or better were quite fond of. i am honestly not sure if its even safe today. nuclear may be safe for the most part but when it goes wrong it goes wrong in such a dramatic way that it is traumatizing.

Fukushima was not Chernobyl: it killed nobody, polluted very little. Much less than a coal plant does in any case, even in terms of radioactive particles put up in the air ..

Fukushima was another reminder that you don't know what you don't know. And with nuclear power, if you don't know something, a whole chunk of your country needs to get evacuated and cleaned up at a stupendous cost.

You are writing something that is not true: in no way can a modern plant cause a large evacuation. Can you explain with an example what you mean? The UNSCEAR has the documentation you need to read in order to graduate from being a green-identity-affirming anti-nuclear commenter into an actual ecologist.

So you count the Fukushima plant as not modern enough, because it caused a large evacuation right? And what counts as modern? Certainly nothing that has ever been built in Germany.

And how fast can we build them? They need to start to come online in the next few years to do anything to stop global warming.

The evacuation was precautionary, killed one person in an accident, only direct loss of life from the Fukushima accident. Not building adequate flood protection and building so close to sea was inane and not something you will find in other sea-shore plants, for example Diablo Canyon in California.

Fukushima incident was down to intentional missmanagement by those in charge of running it, not to not knowing something.

Ah yes. And you trust your government to do a perfect job stopping power companies from any such intentional miss-management, especially given such dire consequences? I don't, even though I trust my government quite far.

Because the Japanese government's failure to stop TEPCO from this miss-management is just as bad as any engineering oversight. And Japan isn't a third-world country. Japan runs a tight ship in most regards, tighter than the US and many EU nations. Other countries with a nuclear industry are far more troublesome: Iran, Pakistan, India, Ukraine, Russia, China... But if Japan can fail so spectacularly, all risk estimates around nuclear power are futile.

Fukushima was absolutely not a reminder of that. The investigations have shown that not only was Fukushima forseeable, it was in fact foreseen by TEPCO's own risk assessments, but they ignored them.

Well, I didn't know about it and most of the world didn't know about it, and anyone who did know about it didn't do shit about it.

For me that qualifies as unknown unknown. Just a question of perspective. Japanese society, government, maybe even their nuclear regulatory agency (whatever that is) trusted TEPCO to know this shit.

I'm not worried about the exact same thing happening in a German plant. I'm worrying about something else happening WE didn't know or care about. Compare commercial aircraft accidents. Every time a passenger plane crashes, there's a big investigation, lessons are learned and thus safety is improved. Still, crashes happen again and again for new reasons, often not anticipated, sometimes Human error of pilots or other personnel, sometimes of engineers, sometimes other causes. But: At most one plane full of people died. If every time the plane went up in a nuclear mushroom cloud or contaminated a couple square kilometers worth of inhabited real estate, I guess we'd rethink air travel altogether.

"was anyone expecting a Tsunami to suddenly manifest over Bavaria?"

No, the thinking or sentiment was, see, even high tech japan cannot securly operate nuclear plants(they know they have earthquakes and tsunamis), so there are surley things we overlooked as well. So nuclear is not totally safe.

And there are, as far as I know. For example the plants were not build taking into accounts terrorists crashing a plane into them.

I have it from someone who actually ran finite elements calculations on this very thing, that you can crash a plane on a French plant all you want, it won't leak. You'd need a well placed JDAM, and even then the damage would be quite local, much less than the Chernobyl graphite fire.