[dheera]

Also from my understanding the earthquake wasn't really much of an issue for most of Japan. It was the tsunami that we don't yet have good protections against.

Why do humans of the 21st century love building delicate structures on the shoreline at sea level? Historical civilizations generally avoided building on the coast, very likely for good reasons, both for disaster resistance and for military reasons. Most ancient cities of the world are not located on the oceanside, but rather along inland rivers or smaller bodies of water, or at least within some safe distance of the coast.

Recent modern cities seem to love building on the coast -- New York, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Dubai -- all these had relatively little history or at least were nothing more than small towns until the past couple hundred years, and are all terrible places to build a city in terms of tsunami resistance.

[not2b]

Moving goods by sea is vastly cheaper than by land: for all those cities, being a port is why they are significant economic engines. And power plants need cooling and can use sea water for that purpose.

[cbhl]

Ancient cities needed to drink the freshwater from the rivers.

Now we have man-made reservoirs and aqueducts to deliver drinking water to the coasts.

Japan certainly seems to have cities along its rivers, but it also has a lot of costal cities (presumably because it's a small island nation, unlike, say, European civilizations).

For Fukushima in particular, I was under the impression they were using the ocean water to cool the plant itself. (Under non-meltdown conditions, you can transfer heat without contaminating the water itself...)

[mixmastamyk]

Los Angeles was founded pretty far from the coast, and at a decent elevation, roughly 77m / 253feet. It just expanded in every direction. Santa Monica is protected by cliffs as well. Farther south isn't so lucky.

[piannucci]

Wouldn’t the plant have been located where demand and cooling capacity were co-located?