A year ago this Sunday, a dreadful and terrifying natural disaster was sweeping a trail of death and destruction along the north-eastern coast of Japan. The Tohoku earthquake and ensuing tsunami claimed an estimated 20,000 lives, washing away entire towns and wreaking havoc with the nation’s infrastructure. An oil refinery was set ablaze leading to the death of six workers and a reservoir also failed, killing a further four people. The nuclear reactors at Fukushima experienced a partial meltdown causing the release of radiation, but killing no one.

The media’s treatment of the entire disaster, however, was completely out of kilter with these facts. The unfolding events at the stricken power station quickly dominated the coverage, ousting the actual earthquake and its dreadful aftermath from the headlines and, it seems, our collective memories. A year later we talk of the anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, not the far, far greater tragedy of the Tohoku earthquake.

In no way do I wish to make light of the suffering of the thousands evacuated from the exclusion zone around the power station, nor to undervalue the immense bravery of the workers who, under extreme pressure, worked tirelessly to minimise the impact of the accident. But we need to keep things in perspective. This was a terrible event, caused by a much more terrible event, which again brought to the surface the many troubling aspects of how the nuclear industry operates.

For instance, the siting of reactors on the eastern seaboard of a country highly vulnerable to earthquakes ought to have necessitated far more preventative measures or, better yet, the decision not to build there at all. The reactor itself was over 40 years old and operating company Tepco had been criticised ahead of the accident for lax safety standards.

The events in Fukushima do not justify a wholesale rejection of nuclear power. We have been able to harness the fissioning of the nucleus of an atom for good and evil, for life-saving medical treatments and to create the atom bomb. Somewhere on this scale of achievements lies our use of nuclear energy. And even within this, not all nuclear power is equal.

The inventor of the technology upon which most of today’s operating nuclear power stations are based, Alvin Weinberg, was all too aware of this. He worried about some of the safety issues involved in using solid uranium fuel in his water-cooled reactors. He believed this configuration, though useful for creating materials for nuclear weapons, posed too many safety risks and created too much hazardous waste for widespread civilian use. As a result, he also directed a research team that invented a radically differently designed reactor, based on using chemically stable liquid salts as the coolant, and thorium as the fuel. Sadly, though he advocated safer, cleaner nuclear designs for the rest of his life, the world took no heed and the reactors we live with today are still fundamentally the same as those that he considered unnecessarily complex and vulnerable to accident.

Fortunately, one of the legacies of Fukushima is that while investment in today’s current reactor designs may have slowed, there is a renewed interest in Alvin’s alternative designs and in other fundamentally different approaches. In China, a major R&D programme into thorium molten salt reactors is underway, with the first test reactors to be completed in 2015 and a larger-scale demo ready by the end of the decade. In the US, safer, molten salt cooled pebble bed reactors are being developed. In Europe, there are various research programmes into new designs. Even here in the UK, where nuclear R&D has been starved of investment, important but fragmented research is underway and, with the help of the Weinberg Foundation, I have helped to set up an all-party parliamentary group dedicated to exploring the potential of thorium-based energy.

Fukushima must mark a turning point in the history of nuclear power. The proponents of the existing technologies should be chastened by the reminder it provided of how things can go wrong. Even if they are not, the providers of investment, both public and private, have had a wake-up call and will proceed with far greater caution.

But the twin concerns of climate change and energy security mean we cannot afford to turn our back on nuclear altogether, as there is no greater potential source of energy on the planet. It is still an amazing achievement to have harnessed the vast energy forged into the heart of an atom during the dying moments of a star, and a safer, cleaner form of nuclear power is possible. As we move forward we need to admit to the failings of the current technologies and commit to developing new ones now.

To try to use Fukushima to justify a complete disavowal of the use of nuclear power would be a gross distortion of the extent of the threat it posed. It would also consign the world to greater use of fossil fuels and higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, unleashing many more natural disasters with huge loss of life. This is the real risk we need to be vigilant against.

When it comes to drilling for oil in the harsh and unpredictable Arctic, Shell has gone to the dogs, it seems. A dachshund and two border collies to be specific.

The dogs’ ability to sniff out oil spills beneath snow and ice has been tested and paid for by Shell – and other oil companies and government research organisations – in preparation for the industry’s entry into the forbidding Arctic terrain. The company hopes to begin drilling for oil off the north-west coast of Alaska in June.

The project, conducted by independent Norwegian researchers Sintef off the Svalbard archipelago in northern Norway in 2009, set out to find a low-tech fix to a nightmare scenario for Arctic drilling: how to clean up a spill in remote waters?

The technology for detecting and tracking spilled oil in the Arctic is still in the early stages. To make clean-up even more challenging, the areas in the Chukchi Sea to be drilled are 1,000 miles from the nearest coastguard base.

As the study itself notes: “Today, no proven operational system exists for detecting oil spill covered by snow and/or ice or hidden under beach sediments.” The remote and challenging Arctic environment made it difficult to rely on sensitive technological equipment, it added.

However, the campaign group Greenpeace said dachshund sniffer dogs were not the answer.

“The idea that small dogs can track leaking oil deep under the Arctic pack ice in the middle of winter is absurd,” said Ben Ayliffe, Arctic campaigner for Greenpeace. “The fact that they are paying good money to seriously use this as an option shows how much they are scrabbling around for a solution.”

Others said the study should be an embarrassment to the industry. “This is another example of how we do not have adequate science and technology yet to drill in the Arctic Ocean – particularly in ice,” Marilyn Heiman, the director of the US Arctic Programme for the Pew Environment Group said in an email.

“It is embarrassing that using dogs to sniff out oil is the best technology we have to track oil under ice. Industry needs to invest in research to determine how to track oil under ice, as well as significantly improve spill response capability in ice, before [being] allowed to drill in ice conditions.”

A spokesman for Shell said the company had done additional research on oil-sniffing dogs since the 2009 study but “nothing major”. Curtis Smith, the spokesman, said Shell has no plans to deploy the dogs in Alaska.

The company’s oil spill response plan, approved by the interior department last month, calls for a fleet of vessels to be on standby at all times, as well as for the construction of a special capping system that would be able to capture and store up to 80,000 barrels of oil a day.

“Shell and others are looking mainly at technology like advanced radars [and] satellite to detect oil under ice,” Smith wrote in an email.

The absence of canine participation is in no way the dogs’ fault. The dogs – border collies Jippi and Blues, and dachshund Tara – were able to pick up the scent of oil up to 5km downwind of a spill, the researchers found.

They held up well to long flights, -40C temperatures, and bumpy snowmobile journeys. They were also able to focus on their mission – and did not go tearing off after polar bear or seals, the study said.

“This gives us future possibilities in using specially trained dogs to search large areas covered with snow and ice to detect possible oil spills,” the study added.