[fbailey]

You can't design against a 7m tsunami wave following a 9.0 earthquake. What exactly does low elevation mean when the wave is 7m high? A tsunami wave that reaches 5km from the shore has so much water and pressure that designing against it is nearly impossible.

Your tower would have been nearly as high as the reactor itself http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-66018.html nobody sane would have proposed something like this before this event.

Looking at past events and errors it's always easy to say that it was a stupid to do it like it was done. Anticipating future events and their inherent risks and designing against them is nearly impossible. That's the danger of nuclear power, it's able to multiply the risks of every natural desaster. You design for a 5m wave - there comes the 7m wave - you design for a 20m wave - the wave was 23m high in some areas.

"Must be managed properly" is not an sentence we should have in anything we design that can have these catastrophic effect, because there's human error, and it will always be there, even in the best planned facilities on the globe.

[mistermann]

Everything you essentially say is ridiculous, seems perfectly reasonable to me. Building a very tall tower, just a metal skeleton with skinny legs, to house your bakup power, seems perfectly reasonable to me. Or even simpler, just build that tower on top of the reactor, in this case.