Natural disasters are not astronomically low probability scenarios, they happen all the time. Astronomically low probability would be something that is unlikely to happen during the entire lifetime of the planet.
No, but an avalanche in a flat area is a lot less likely than, say, "what if the coolant runs out" and it seems they were missing some basic handling of these sorts of scenarios while still waxing poetic about things like avalanche contingency plans.
This is pretty straightforward survivorship bias, i.e., you don't hear about the astronomically low-probability scenarios which don't result in real-world catastrophes (consider every building, bridge, etc which hasn't collapsed).
We have to balance that against the millions of annual fossil fuel deaths (tens of thousands die each year just in the US and just due to coal pollution https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-other-reason-...) and the cliff toward which climate science tells us we're careening.
Survivorship bias may explain why these events are so vivid in people's minds, but when the bar is that _there should be no survivors at all_ (i.e. no catastrophes), the fact that there _are_ survivors with which to form a bias is in and of itself a concern.
It’s a concern which must be weighed against the alternative. In the case of nuclear vs fossil fuels, it’s millions of annual deaths in the near term (air pollution) and much more with climate change.
Fukushima was a power failure. Sure, am improbable disaster caused the power failure, but the issue was still a power failure. They should haven’t been able to handle it and couldn’t.
The power failure is not "low probability", it is the dominant failure mode that happens somewhere around 1 in 1000 to 1 in 10,000 reactor years.
Reactors were licensed in the 1970s based on an entirely wrong model which saw the dominant failure mode being the pressure vessel bursting. Laymen have a totally wrong point of view about that, they think a pressure cooker really has the metal burst and go off like a bomb, really the seal breaks and you get sprayed with superheated steam which is dangerous enough. Pressure vessels burst because the chemicals eat them from the inside out but for every pressure vessel that bursts thousands of storage tanks get sucked in.
After TMI the model was updated to recognize "station blackout" as the #1 risk.
Sure, I think that's true, but it was an event of such magnitude that there's a clear state interest in regulating against it! They had to evacuate a huge area around the disaster, for some time. Sure, it was a best-case scenario, but it was the best case of a worst case.
(I support nuclear power, for whatever that's worth. I think it's a good idea and we should do a lot more of it.)
