Ah, the classic "this old power plant design had this failure mode, therefore all nuclear does this" argument. Do you know when Fukushima was built and what year the designs were drafted for it?
I don't know enough here to comment on who's right, but when the magnitude of catastrophic failure is large enough, model error is appreciably important. So in those cases past experience is a very important input into the decision, even if not perfectly correlated.
If anything, it proves that identifying all failure modes is challenging, and theoretically safe is not the same as practically safe.
"So in those cases past experience is a very important input into the decision, even if not perfectly correlated."
Of course it is, which is why modern reactor designs have incorporated safety features based on these accidents and older designs have been retrofitted (with some exceptions that are legitimately concerning). It's entirely true that it is impossible to predict every mode of catastrophic failure, but that does not mean it's impossible to create designs that are resilient to unplanned disasters. No type of power plant can be perfectly safe, but
for assessing practical safety records, in terms of deaths / TWh generated, even estimating conservatively nuclear power is safer than any other source of power (including wind and solar). Some references for this:
Hydroelectic as well technically. A set of hydroelectric dam failures in China in 1975 killed more people directly from the event (171,000) than is estimated for the direct and future deaths caused from Chernobyl and Fukushima combined.
The Boing accidents showed that technological progress doesn't help in minimizing errors, as there's always a higher incentive of minimizing costs in the implementation, even if the plan is safe. A very important thing we can do is to limit the possible worst case scenario.
It probably can, but there's a fundamental difference between a nuclear reactor and an airplane.
There's a handful of nuclear reactors compared to planes, and new nuclear reactor designs, where there's an opportunity to cut corners, are not being introduced at the same rate as new plane designs.
A reactor is a large, heavy, stationary thing. Economic concerns exist, but they're not going to make engineering decisions based on weight like you would in a plane where every kilogram of material costs a fortune in fuel over the lifetime of the plane. An extra chunk of concrete in a nuclear plant costs nothing, operationally speaking.
We're just lucky that the planes aren't nuclear despite many wildly ill-advised attempts to make this a reality.
If you look at Fukushima disaster, it was not a design problem either, but maintainence problem. It was probably running more without modifications than it was designed for.
There were updates suggested to modernize the facility, but for cost cutting purposes they were ignored:
It was a design problem and a maintenance problem. A lot of the design decisions made in that era later proved to be Very Bad Ideas, like how there was no proper hydrogen containment above the reactor vessel.
Newer designs have suffered more major faults and managed to contain virtually all of the radiation. American designs, in particular, place great emphasis on having an extremely resilient containment structure above the reactor. A lot of things can go horribly wrong but so long as the extremely radioactive gas is contained it can later be cleaned up. These radioactive elements are extremely toxic, but also very short lived. You just need to buy time.
The Fukushima design may as well have had a tin roof, it exploded almost immediately and exposed the reactor to the elements. If that's not a design flaw, I don't know what is.
That and a number of the systems necessary to keep the reactor under control depended on poorly positioned generators that weren't flood-proofed. This seems like a major oversight on a building located in a tsunami and typhoon zone.
I agree, Fukishima was designed about 15 years after nuclear power was first invented, it isn't that far off from complaining about how unsafe cars are in crashes using Model-Ts as an example. Fukushima should have been decommissioned before it was even 'completed' but because of the political barriers in building a new nuclear plant(s) they just stuck with it since it had already got over the regulation hurdles.
I think our problems with nuclear power are 95% political and maybe 5% or less technological. Canada for example has nuclear plants that use a neutron moderating coolant. If they lose coolant, the reaction stops. Unlike earlier designs where a loss of coolant lead to overheating and potential explosions. Not to mention new nuclear plants need 6-7 completely independent shutdown/safety features which is unheard of for earlier plants that have at best 1 or 2 emergency shutdown procedures that interfere with each other.
