2.3 Billion Dollar Nuclear Power Plant Sits Unused Except As Tourist Attraction

Do you think that applies to every nuke , even the newer designs ?

Truthfully? Yeah. Several big problems with nukes have never been addressed. I gave up on nukes a few years ago when I saw that little progress was being made particularly with the issue of storing nuclear waste and persistent safety and security issues but the promises continue that the latest and greatest generation of nuclear plants will solve those problems once and for all. A lifetime of un-kept nuclear promises has made me a non-believer.

I am not an engineer but my understanding is that all reactors are passively cooled to some extent. "Passively Cooled" as it is used in the nuclear industry seems to me to mean more efficiently cooled without power, or in other words it is a longer period of time until core meltdown occurs.

There are a lot of weasel words used in articles about new 'safer' nuclear power plants. In fact the word safer does not mean safe because failure in a nuclear power plant can have such catastrophic results. The fad now seems to be to criticize the older power plant designs as being inherently unsafe yet at the time they were state of the art and we blissfully accepted the word of the 'experts' that it was so and that they were safe.

Here is one ranking of the most vulnerable nuke plants in the U.S.

In the U.S. we get about 20% of our electrical power from nuclear. The fact is that with increased energy efficiency alone we can eliminate that 20% and more and with alternative energy such as wind and solar coming online rapidly there is no need for new or replacement nuclear power plants.

Pretty good.

Three Mile Island

Chernoybl

Fukushima Daichi