Like a lot of people, I've been following the events unfolding in Japan after the earthquake as well as the worldwide reaction and I can't help putting my engineering hat on. I was in college at UCLA when the now damaged Fukushima nuclear plant was under construction. Coincidently at the time, the United States was also going through the first "energy crises" with high gas prices brought on by suppliers in the Middle East. The UCLA engineering school quickly put together classes and seminars on energy topics, including understanding how energy was then produced, future supplies, efficiency and even renewable energy. As a student, it was clear to me then that this had to be addressed by my generation.
Fast forward 38 years. The verdict on our accomplishments is mixed. Yes, we did make improvements in efficiency and some improvements in supply but little progress toward sustainable energy. We basically still get all our energy the same way the cave man did; we burn stuff. Back then it was wood, today it's burning fossil fuels or a hot pile of decaying rocks. There are other ways to extract energy, particularly chemically as is done in biology, or fusion which is how the sun operates. We touched on that in those seminars 38 years ago but for various reasons never throughly pursued them.
In my opinion, we failed miserably on another issue that was obvious back then; infrastructure. The Fukushima complex is almost 40 years old. Why was it still operating? We don't even keep sports stadiums that long! An entire generation of engineers has had the opportunity to improve on that basic design yet it didn't happen. Here in the US, we haven't built a new nuclear power plant since the '70's. Fortunately, the Navy continued using nuclear energy, so design improvements have been made, but we haven't applied them to replacing these old power plants. Think about it. The next generation will be the most energy dependent generation ever but the foundation of their supply would have been built by their grandparents.
Infrastructure does not last forever.
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