Well I am not sure about Japan. I don’t think that they ever have taken nuclear safety as seriously as the US has.
They have had some screwy accidents there. One of which is that they had accidently had a nuclear criticality in a bucket at a nuclear fuel enrichment plant. That is to say that they accidently made a nuclear reactor in a bucket that went critical (made neutrons and a whole lot of gamma rays) that actually killed a the workers that made the mistake.
But in the US we have over the three decades that I have worked in nuclear power I have seen attention to nuclear safety continuously improved.
About ten years ago they started a whole new way of thinking about “Severe Accident Recovery”. This was planning for just the type of accident that Japan is going through.
We actually bought portable generators and made up wires so we could hook them up to the equipment we want to run.
Nobody's been able to explain to me why it was so impossible to get a temporary solution in place for a couple of days until a permanent line could be run in there. I'm not saying replace the cooling systems, there's nothing wrong with them. Or even replace the generators that power the cooling systems. There's nothing wrong with them either. They just lost power to the system.
For the life of me I don't understand why a ship couldn't be stationed off-shore to feed power to the system to power it up for a while. Or hell, they could have flown in generators to power the thing up. I don't care if they had to do 15 generators hooked up in parallel to each plant to get enough power to power them up. ANYTHING. No price should have been too much to pay to get power back into those coolant systems. They were the key to this whole fiasco. And nobody could figure out a way to jump-start them.
Like I said, I'm just a computer guy and don't know a whole lot about engineering, but I just never understood why it was impossible to get enough electricity to those pumps to power them up until a more permanent structure could have been devised. I thought the firetrucks and helo's dropping water in the things was kinda Keystone Kopish.
I'll grant that it may have been extremely diffficult, but as impossible as Tepco clearly found it?
I've always been of the contention that if they'd brought in an American team they'd have found or made a way to get those coolant systems online.
But maybe that's just me.