alt Hacker NewsThe over regulation is there becaused the Soviets have shown us what under regulation, disregard for safety and zealotry can lead to.
Even Japan managed to screw up. Yes, it took a 9 Richter scale earthquake and a tsunami, plus some mistakes that were made during development.
Passive safety works just fine, but it's expensive to build huge water tanks and containers that could withstand 9/11 type of events.
You left out the culture of borderline malfeasance on the utility's part and the failure to aggressively pursue that culture on the regulator's part.
Anyway if the fine print were risk of catastrophic failure in the event of a >9.0 earthquake I think that would be acceptable (and I think a lot of people would agree with me) depending on the geography where it was to be built.