Re: Underground
Not really, no. There was only the one method of generating backup power, no emergency batteries, no protected hardline to bring a minimal amount of power in from the grid to run the pumps, and no passive method of circulating cooling water to keep built-up decay heat from melting the fuel if all the power went out. Not even a small auxiliary turbine that could use steam produced by that selfsame heat to directly turn a mechanical pump, turbocharger style.
And even if you consider "has external diesel generators" as a suitable failsafe, then the design may have been fine but its placement was absolutely boneheaded. Fuel tanks on top of the gensets instead of the other way round, no snorkels on the air intakes, etc. Despite it being at sea level, in a particularly earthquake-vulnerable area of a country more or less directly over a continental faultline and often beset with tsunamis.
Add to that seemingly no proper contingency plan for preventing fuel meltdown in the case of total water circulation failure (which could have happened for various other reasons anyway), e.g. physically separating the core somehow to prevent central heat buildup, or connecting external pumps, and a parent company whose main approach to dose monitoring and site safety was "write down any old shit, and if that doesn't work, run away", and you have something that only really avoided taking the #1 spot ahead of Chernobyl by luck rather than judgement.
Not to mention the weird choice of where to put the longer-term waste storage pools (right at the top of the building, where water needs a lot of energy to be pumped to and anything that leaks will piss all over the lower levels) and the lack of suitable hydrogen venting should they also start to cook off... and no proper secondary containment for the molten core and waste water should there actually be a meltdown (would, say, a protective pool of cold water built underneath and never normally used for anything not have been worth a little extra time and money to install? with enough spare capacity to hold whatever falls out of the reactor, and able to rapidly cool the individual blobs of the former core as it leaked out of the primary flask? Or at least some extra layers of concrete foundation, textured such to break up the material that might fall through? Anything that would have prevented it settling into a big ol' solidified puddle of radioactive awfulness, and stopped the reactor water leaching away into the soil?)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
