The failure of the world's largest seawall, which cost $1.5 billion to construct, shows that building stronger sea walls to protect larger areas would have been even less cost-effective. In the case of the ongoing crisis at the nuclear power plants, higher and stronger sea walls should have been built if power plants were to be built at that site. Fundamentally, the devastation in coastal areas and a final death toll predicted to exceed 10,000 could push Japan to redesign its seawalls or consider more effective alternative methods of coastal protection for extreme events. Such hardened coastlines can also provide a false sense of security to property owners and local residents as evident in this situation.