If you saw some news reports that said that they had backup generators then that sounds more reasonable. All the reports that I saw simply stated that they had no power because the external power lines were destroyed. And with no power coming in they had no water pumps. They got the situation back under control, from what I heard, by running in some new power lines.

Your note that they ran out of fuel for a backup generator makes things sound even worse. It would, I feel, mean that they did not properly plan for the disaster. And, why couldn’t they get the Japan government to fly some fuel in with a helicopter or drive it in to the plant? Of all the things that you would want to do in an emergency, one of the top priorities would certainly need to be to keep nuclear plants from going critical.

The rule here is that when you are dealing with situations where lives are at risk you need to make certain there are enough safety procedures in place to deal with any problems. If very large numbers of lives are at stake as they would be with a nuclear plant meltdown then you need to make absolutely sure that every possible problem is adequately covered. And that was clearly not the case.

People in the U.S. and around the world need to remember that this was not just a local problem for Japan. Had there been a major nuclear meltdown and radiation leak it could have conceivably sent a radioactive cloud around the world and affected a tremendous number of people. One report that I saw stated the Three Mile Island incident from years ago was virtually nothing compared with what happened with those Japan nuclear reactors.

These are personal opinions.