Continued fact denial
Hey Orlowski! Why aren't you covering the emerging evidence that the cores of units 1, 2, and 3 melted down and burned through the pressure vessels? You are very selective about the facts you choose to report. Too selective for a journalist. Exactly selective enough for a fact denier though.
"But the stricken reactors coped well"
Recent examination revealed that the cores of units 1, 2, and 3 melted down. Unit 2 definitely melted through the steel pressure vessel, and the investigators believe the same occurred on units 1 and 3, though direct inspection is not yet possible due to high levels of radiation, water, and damage from the hydrogen explosions.
In what sense can the stricken reactors be considered to have coped well? I guess they didn't actually blow their lids off and spew burning graphite and fuel into the environment like at Chernobyl. That's a pretty low bar for comparison.
"The UK's gas-cooled reactors ... give longer timescales for remedial action. "
Although melting has ceased, normal cooling has not been restored to any of the striken units at Fukushima #1 to date. The cooling that has been done amounts to sticking a hose into the building and pouring water over the radioactive slag at the bottom of the pressure vessels. Modern reactor designs would have to be robust indeed if only ambient air cooling was available. I hope this is the case, but I very much doubt it. In a "modern" reactor, if it became necessary to stuff a firehose into the reactor to achieve cooling, I suspect the touted safety features would look a good deal scarier.
Can't we return to reality? Fukushima was a diasaster of engineering. The reactors were not designed to withstand conditions known to be possible at their site. An obsolete, dangerous design was permitted to continue operating long after the lessons of Three Mile Island should have resulted in its closure. Three uncontrolled raactors destroyed themselves in a nuclear meltdown. Millions of liters of highly contaminated water are leaking into the environment, and no assessment of health risks from this contamination is yet possible. The fact that measured, direct health effects are yet modest does not lessen the severity of what went wrong, or excuse poor design and regulatory decisions.
Whether or not you think nuclear power is cool, the only supportable path is to acknowledge that Fukushima was a disaster, so we can learn from it.