After that, the reaction has been self-sustaining.
It's easy to campaign to tear something down. It's hard to be the one who has to rebuild the replacement. We need people who focus on the latter before the former.
The truth is our systemic desire to cut costs cuts corners. Everything after each disaster will have been "obvious".
The price of the tiniest of mistakes is outweighing the advantage.
Stick a power plant in the middle of nowhere and charge batteries with it if you want to convince people.
> not exactly a scathing indictment of nuclear power itself.
No, but it's certainly a statement about our ability to operate nuclear power. You really can't separate the two.
Fukushima may have been spared the worst, but the amount of deaths is only part of the story. Pripyat is still a ghost town. That's nearly 50,000 people that were permanently displaced from their homes. I imagine quite a few people are not returning to the Fukushima area as well.
... in tsunami endangered areas. Yes, Japanese made a bad mistake to let Americans build such a badly designed nuclear plant in that region and this was known before the disaster. They did not care - the price was good and the risk was acceptable to the people in charge.
Most of nuclear plants in the world are not in tsunami endangered areas though and are operated safely.