The next nuclear accident that will occur in the world is 100% preventable, and without any hindsight bias I will tell you exactly how... after it occurs.
/s
(seriously, if you want me to take a claim seriously that accidents are preventable, talk about what we are doing wrong today, not in the past.)
Engineers at TEPCO did tell them what they were doing wrong at Fukushima Daiichi. They were ignored:
"In 2008, TEPCO did two sets of calculations, one based on the Headquarters for Earthquake Research Promotion (HERP) fault models which suggested tsunami height estimates of 8.4–10.2 m relative to the reference sea level. Another one based on Satake et al. [47] produced 8.7–9.2 m tsunami height estimates which were also apparently dismissed [32]. TEPCO ignored them, claiming there was ‘no wave source model’ for the former, and it required a tsunami deposit investigation for the latter [32]. In 2009, new estimates using updated bathymetry and tidal data yielded a 6.1 m tsunami height [12,32]. This was not followed-up and was only reported to Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA) on 7 March 2011 [48]. A post-event study [48] asserts that ‘a senior NISA official has confirmed to us that NISA neither ‘commissioned nor reviewed’ numerical studies of tsunami run-up at Fukushima Daiichi’."
The reason you only hear about these issues after an accident occurs is not because they could only be predicted in hindsight, but because no-one cared about the predictions until after the accident.
if our title read "Nuclear power plants are still being run recklessly, and the next Fukushima-like accident is likely 100% preventable today" it would get my attention, and I would read what the claims that we need to be doing are.
small statistical disagreements about experts on the other hand, are hard to take as seriously.
The thing is that those are not small statistical disagreements.
The maximum tsunami+tide they designed for was 5m. Design parameters said that you should have a wall 2x what you think you need so they built a 10m (about 30 foot) wall.
Two independent teams came up with realistic tsunamis near that 10m wall (one over and one under), so they should have changed their wall requirement up substantially. But they argued themselves into believing that 6m was a realistic maximum then did nothing.
Their estimates were also out of line with actual tsunamis experienced elsewhere. Tsunamis in recent decades from earthquakes similar to the ones that they knew could hit the area have ranged from 3-30m. Even a 7.0 earthquake managed to create a 12m tsunami in New Guinea.
The actual tsunami was 13m.
The most telling point is how the response afterwards has shown lessons not learned. For example The United States National Research Council of the National Academies had a 21 person panel conduct 18 months of interviews with a wide variety of technical experts on how the disaster could be prevented here. NOT ONE of the members of the panel or the people interviewed was an expert on tsunamis. The author's of the paper clearly believe that if you're studying the aftermath of a tsunami, you should at least talk to someone who studies tsunamis...
If the paper is correct, it is a question of time until somewhere in the world we have another entirely preventable major disaster because local officials underestimate tsunami threats that current knowledge is more than sufficient to predict. Of course enough things can go wrong that the next big disaster won't be that. But that preventable disaster is coming...
The point of that link being, there are people that are thinking about what the problems are and working to fix them, so it is sort of glib to demand that such things be done.
/s
(seriously, if you want me to take a claim seriously that accidents are preventable, talk about what we are doing wrong today, not in the past.)