Time for a famous Jack Bog photoshop effort, add a map of Japan and the words "and ends here" right below the slogan "The nuclear renaissance starts here"

You can be sure, if it's Westinghouse.

Way back when, Mad magazine changed that to "You can sue if it's Westinghouse.". Alas, the industry got nervous about exactly that and wired themselves a deal with Price-Anderson and other corporate welfare dodges.

Irony: linking to a reactor design that requires no one to even push a button, no electricity, no generators, and no pumps in order to go from operating to shut down.

If the plants in Japan were using this reactor design, we'd likely be talking about the cleanup efforts of the tsunami-destroyed cities, civil war in Libya, or the latest local scam to build toy trains.

The Fukushima plants all shut down. But the cooling systems failed.

Even if absurd amounts of money are spent to make a plant safer than any ever before, and even if the organization running it is more safety minded and responsible and less profit minded than any ever before, there's still the same huge problem that's been been foisted off onto future generations for over 50 years now...

"What happens to the used fuel rods, daddy?" "We just put them out the way until someday, someone figures that out."

Just think, in 30 or 40 years from now, instead of talking about nuclear energy and waste, we'll be talking about "remember the good 'ol days when every home in Portland had reliable, consistent power 24 hours a day? Then a bunch of goons said we can do everything with just wind and solar power. So now that we've fixed global warming, the air currents are calmer and we don't have as much wind as we used to, and clouds are allowed to form so we don't have as much solar intensity as we used to...and now we only get power a couple hours a day."

Another Dark Ages. I didn't mean that as a pun, either. For real.

Yes, the cooling systems failed.

The AP1000 doesn't require the external cooling system to safely shut down and deal with decay heat, because it's a fundamentally different design.

The AP1000 requires gravity to shut down safe. Diesel backup generators taken out by a tsunami? Doesn't matter, since we're using power to keep the reactor operating, and a power loss causes the control rods and valves to automatically shut.

•••

Also, "used fuel rods" are a political problem, not a problem of physics or time. A used fuel rod is 99% useable fuel, with 1% neutron poisons that will decay over the next 50 years. Get that 1% out through reprocessing, and load the other 99% back in and make energy out of it.

Or, use a design that Bill Gates threw a couple billion dollars at: the Travelling Wave Reactor which uses depleted Uranium as fuel (which we have shedloads of laying around as byproduct from bomb making and reactor fuel enriching), and "reprocesses" waste in situ.

Of course, all of this should be done smartly, and should not be rushed. However, we can't just go on doing the same anymore - we can't keep extending the life of 40 year old reactors. We can't just keep burning 60 million year old plants in the form of oil and coal. We can't go directly to wind due to the fluctuations in generation capacity and the overload it would cause on the grid. Solar isn't efficient enough yet. Tidal is still experimental, and the environmental impacts aren't known yet. Geothermal causes earthquake swarms. Hydroelectric kills fish. Natural Gas extraction destroys the water table. Drilling for oil destroys entire ecologies.

The choice is to either refine what we have to work better and safer, or to turn out the lights and go back to the 1700s.

I wonder if there is an iodide-like pill for coal pollution? Or one for the miners who die to supply it?

The AP1000 doesn't require the external cooling system to safely shut down and deal with decay heat, because it's a fundamentally different design.

The AP1000 requires gravity to shut down safe. Diesel backup generators taken out by a tsunami? Doesn't matter, since we're using power to keep the reactor operating, and a power loss causes the control rods and valves to automatically shut.

Ha! Ha! Come back in about 40 years. In the meantime, you sound like an early Woody Allen movie.

They should go for the LEED Plutonium rating.

Don't you mean "LEED Uranium rating"?

Plutonium, uranium, cesium, strontium. All of the above, and then some.

You had me at "plants".

We are now enlightened as to the world wide threat posed by reactors from anywhere on earth. Now check out the location of all existing reactors and those under construction.
http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm
Scary.