These power station places are points of extremely high energy densities, and when things go wrong, it happens very very quickly.
Forgive me for conversion errors in the following
Take my world, there's 300lb per second of coal going in...same energy input as at least 500lb.sec of seasoned wood. Gets turned into steam at 2600psi, and 1005F (265gal/sec of water goes through that process)...got to get the maximum potential that you can to cascade down through the energy recovery process, then decompress and cool through expansion process to get the maximum energy out the other end...at THAT end, and it scares me, it's 22,000V, and thousands of amps (then it's stepped up to 330,000V).
At any point in that process, you can become toast...release the steam, and it expands 200 times. make it a pencil thin "beam", and it will cut and flay you...become part of a circuit, and you vaporise...release the coal dust and ignite it, and it's the same effect as the MOAB.
Nuclear don't have the issues in combustion massflow, the energy source is so concentrated...the downstream is the same.
Hydros are more potential energy wells, with the wells filled by rainfall, and the power being supplied by gravity and mass (think a sack of sand over an elevated pulley, and the rotation of the pulley making power)...you need major volumes and masses of water falling relatively low pressures (head)…steam we did it with temperature and pressure, hydro here only has 350psi of head, so you have to make up for it with mass-flow, and it's tonnes and tonnes per second.
All of these technologies can lay waste to a site in seconds or minutes if the risks aren't managed, and the fact that there are occasional, albeit spectacular news entries are testament to how well they are designed and managed.
How many of these extremely high energy installations are there around the world, and how many headlines ?
WRT the posted incident, there are designs, and maintenance considerations. Engineering considerations when things aren't going exactly right...not defending anything here.
But this unit was the one left doing all of the grid load/frequency control for the section of the grid that it was connected to...and that's the worst place to be in with respect to managing your plant.
Here's a few other major failures
https://www.slideshare.net/JosephFByrdJr/duvha-55780131
pleasant prairie
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/207824-pleasant-prairie-unit-feedwater-line-failure
This one killed a number of plant operators … lead the industry to find out that chrome bumpers in the scrap steel stream protected us from an unknown failure until the cars of the 50s and 60s weren't there anymore.
I got caught with the transition from group 1 to Group 2 lubes causing varnish and sludge in the machines...in other places, that has lead to servo valve failure and catastrophe.