What faulty construction/design? I always thought it was due to human error, and for the most part wiki seems to support this.
Well, if you count approving and building the plant in the first place as 'human error'.
To wit, the reactor had what's called a 'positive void coefficient'. This is a
very bad thing. What it means is that when a bubble forms, IE water transforming to steam, the reaction in that area goes UP. Because the reaction goes up, the heat goes up, and you get MORE bubbles. This can lead to a runaway reaction.
Plants in the USA are required to have a negative void coefficient - bubbles reduce the reaction, creating a self-regulating situation.
The second would be the lack of a secondary containment structure - no dome to contain the radioactive materials after the breach of the primary vessel.
Either of which would have most likely prevented the release of radioactive materials into the environment.
I do agree though, that nuclear power is a good thing overall. We just need to figure out how to store the waste, because as many know, Hanford is not a very fun place to be downstream to.
Chernobyl? Three Mile Island? What about all the nuclear waste storage - how long before that stuff becomes a real problem?
Nuclear power waste isn't actually that big of a deal - for one thing you can reprocess it to recover 90-95% of it to be used as fuel again. The rest becomes much less radioactive much faster. As a bonus, you'd be able to keep a couple hundred years of waste for a plant in an area about the size of a football field, including shielding.
Thus, with some reprocessing/recycling Yucca Mountain becomes more of a temporary staging point than a facility that needs to last tens/hundreds of thousands of years.
Our current policy actually makes some sense - let the raw waste sit for 40 years and it's a lot easier to reprocess as it's nowhere near as hot as when it came out of the reactor. This reduces expenses.
As for Hanford - I make the distinction of 'nuclear
power' for a reason. Hanford was primarily a weapons making facility - and I have to admit, we really screwed up environmentally wise during the cold war.