[sofixa]

What was real was that a bad design that the company operating the plant was warned about repeatedly, survived an earthquake, but didn't survive a tsunami. As a result, there was an evacuation. And nobody died from anything directly related to the power plant itself, only due to the evacuation. Multiple times more people died in an oil tank fire in another city due to the same earthquake+tsunami. And during its lifetime Fukushima saved countless lives by not emitting air pollution.

On the "generating reliable power for a country" scale, everything is a tradeoff. There is no perfect solution that just works with no downside, especially in geographically challenged countries such as Japan.