> The Fukushima accident was preventable, if international best practices and standards had been followed, if there had been international reviews, and had common sense prevailed in the interpretation of pre-existing geological and hydrodynamic findings.

I think the main point is that the damage wasn't caused by a freak storm that no one could have predicted. It was caused by a series of mistakes that we shouldn't have made with the knowledge we had at the time.

The report says that for less than $1M they could have raised the emergency generators up higher in which case they could have maintained reactor cooling and had reactor damage but no major harm. Also there was evidence of similar events in the inhabited past.

Only under an overly broad definition of "preventable". In the context of this article, "preventable" means that the failure mode was foreseen and not accounted for in the design. If the failure mode had not been foreseen then the accident would not be preventable, because how can you protect against something you can't even imagine?