3/13/2011 PERMALINK
Why the nuclear regulatory environment insures catastrophic failures like the one in Japan. In a Scientific American article on the Japanese nuke plant failure, physicist Ken Bergeron, one of America's top nuclear reactor accident simulation experts at Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico said this:

"The probability of this occurring is hard to calculate primarily because of the possibility of what are called common-cause accidents, where the loss of offsite power and of onsite power are caused by the same thing. In this case, it was the earthquake and tsunami. So we're in uncharted territory, we're in a land where probability says we shouldn't be. And we're hoping that all of the barriers to release of radioactivity will not fail."

You are designing a reactor for a country where many active offshore faults are constantly producing earthquakes, which many times in the past have caused tsunamis. So you use an old reactor design on a coast with huge faults just offshore. A design where the backup generators necessary to prevent a meltdown during any earthquake shutdown event are likely to be disabled by a tsunami?
Sheer idiocy on the surface, when their are designs that would be intrinsically safe in an earthquake/tsunami event, but this is the way our current regulatory environment works.
Designs like the one being pushed by Bill Gates, which would be far safer to use in an earthquake zone, are shunned by the world's nuke regulators who strongly prefer the old clunky designs of 50 years ago.
Our current regulatory environment makes innovation anathema to government regulators.
Approval can be obtained for an old complex and expensive design that is sure to fail catastrophically in an earthquake/tsuanmi zone, but not for an intrinsically more safe design that could be located in an earthquake zone safely.
This isn't limited to nuclear regulation. The FDA promotes a similar regulatory environment. For ever life they save by keeping a bad drug off the market, a thousand lives are lost for lack of the many new technologies that would be developed and deployed in a more sane regulatory environment. Approval of a new medical technology today often costs billions and can take as long as ten years. This causes innovative engineers and entrepreneurs to go elsewhere. People are dying by the millions annually today, because of all the lost innovation in the medical field caused by its regulatory environment. There is no outcry for lives lost to the lack of innovation. Regulators pay no price for creating an environment that blocks a thousand life-saving designs, but they can see their careers destroyed for letting one bad innovation make it to market.