What scares me is that mankind seems to be compounding already bad situations and making them worse. I always feel for people in huge natural disasters because we all have that in common, we're all puny humans on this planet and there are some major forces running around it that create major havoc on us. I have a particular feeling for people in earthquakes because that's living where I live and thinking about them a lot. Sisters and brothers on the Ring of Fire.
But the end story here might well end up like Katrina, where the natural problems were bad enough, but the real disaster, the even worse than a Cat4 hurricane, or a 8.9 earthquake and resulting tsunami was a man-made failure. When you're pumping seawater into a reactor that's running away that thing is already way past toast. Hopefully - as designed - the containment vessel will contain it, but that patch of land - off limits for hundreds of thousands of years now. Like TMI or Chernobyl.
If only there had been people at the time those power plants were built who might have said: Hey, bad enough building huge nuclear reactors in the first place*, but you really should not site them adjacent to major fault lines or on an active volcano. Nah, all those voices were dismissed as a bunch of neo-Luddite, tree-huggin' hippie crap. And it's not like they didn't know that the fault lines were right there, and they were just the perfect type to make tsunamis - in fact such things were so common that they invented a word for it.
So love, strength & sympathy to the survivors of the quake and the tsunami. For the power plants, a whole lot less.
* - it's the most major example of an area where economy of scale (building things bigger so they do more cheaper - like buying toilet paper at Costco by the case) does not work. The bigger a nuclear reactor the more uncontrollable it is, the greater the risk of catastrophic failure.
