you have my atention ....but where is the rest....

why put up a clip that just cuts out like that, where's the rest?

Full version here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alJo5m1y0uM

This is one of those monumentally gigantic disasters, that no matter how often you revisit it, you still cannot fully comprehend the sheer magnitude of all the forces in action causing this kind of - for lack of a better word - biblical destruction. It makes you understand how people believed in the wrath of the supernatural before science was established.
And all that is still before the imminent nuclear meltdown incident even comes into play, which adds a whole new level to the long-lasting devastation effects on the region.

We can handle mother nature/earth. We can handle man-made risks.
We cannot handle both at the same place and time.

Building nuclear power plants on geologically active land was about as smart as building skyscrapers on top of swamps would be.
I hope California is watching and stepping up preparation efforts. A big one is due to happen there in withing the next 10 years and with every year past its due, it will become more and more powerful than expected.

#4 The nuclear disaster was not caused by the earthquake (the plant withstood the quake) but by the tsunami. It's a small but important difference. The tsumani was several meters higher than anything they'd ever have anticipated -- and Japan is no stranger to tsunamis!

The root problem was that the emergency power generators (diesel engines) were in a basement room, so when the tsunami flooded it, emergency power failed. Had the generators been higher up, the generators would have kept the plant running through its controlled emergency shutdown procedure.

But nobody has ever built a power plant with elevated emergency generators. They probably would in the future; if any new plants would ever be built, of course.

#5 Cosmetics... doesn't change anything about my point. We are always just racing after, building and preparing for what we expect plus about 10-20%... or may be 50% if there is good regulation in place - and then something twice or three times the size of anything we've ever seen before happens.
How about building those things to withstand 200-300% before the MCA, so when shit goes down, we can be like "Geez, that was close - saved us billions in emergency management and environmental clean up costs, good call! We better keep stepping it up at the same rate for the next one like this."

The ancient technology we still use today is fundamentally flawed. It is like trying to cook with gun powder instead of natural gas. The source of energy is relatively rare, the reaction is highly energetic and dangerously uncontrollable, and the final output is laughable compared to the total release of energy.
What we need is low temperature, low pressure, passively fail-safe nuclear power, not the same old highly inefficient reactors with a feel-good safety refresh, leaving us with piles of nuclear waste that needs to be looked after for centuries.

You would probably have to completely start over from scratch (something like LFTR) and decentralize the energy market to an actual "free market" (appropriately regulated of course) - which would ruin the very lucrative crony energy/government deals, especially since the nuclear arms race ended as well. Meanwhile the current quasi-monopoly is still making energy giants more profitable every day, the longer they run and the less they maintain plants. And when things eventually go south, the taxpayer/environment will bleed instead of them.
You can't seriously think telling them to put their generators on stilts would solve all these problems of traditional nuclear power.