Small reactors make a ton of sense, but they're an even harder sell to the general public, because there's even more NIMBYism. With larger plants you can put th

Small reactors make a ton of sense, but they're an even harder sell to the general public, because there's even more NIMBYism. With larger plants you can put them a bit out of sight, out of mind, but a large fleet of smaller reactors ends up being distributed over a much more diverse area. The primary problem with the big plants is that these older designs don't fail safe. The newer generations will. Catastrophic failure means "We stop making power", not "We irradiated everything close to us" That's why people are "shilling" for Gen IV designs. I'm not sure there's "many" plants that are unsafe due to natural disasters like this one. It isn't like we have hundreds of plants in an area where there are 100 year natural disasters that can take them out - otherwise we'd see these things happening all of the time. There are unsafe plants out there. For sure. But we haven't lost as many lives to every nuclear accident ever as we have to coal power generation in the US alone. We know there is a path to safety for nuclear designs, we know they are a very efficient method of power generation, and we know they're not going to cause the global temperature to rise. The failures are more spectacular in appearance than the normal operation of our current primary sources of energy, and that's the primary issue, even though the death count still swings spectacularly towards the normal operation of coal power plants. We should be building modern nuclear reactors. I personally don't care if they're big Gen IV plants or small neighborhood ones - I just think the Gen IV designs are more likely to come to fruition.