Yeah, but they are lobbying to we allow industry to build new plants without a fundamental and transparent rethinking of the safety issues, and with various proposed schemes to limit or eliminate corporate liability. (Is that really the best way to ensure safe designs and operation procedures?)

The reactor designs are newer, but we also need newer designs for management and disaster prevention/response. Even with the crappy obsolete Fukishima reactors, we would have come through this event fine had there been a (much) bigger investment in those non-technological areas when the plant was built and over the decades since then.

Um, the root cause of the problems at Fukushima had nothing to do with the design of the reactors. The root cause was that their backup diesel generators, which were to supply power to the reactor control and safety systems in the event of a shutdown, along with their switchgear, were sited behind a seawall that got overcome by the tsunami. If the backup generators had been sited properly, this whole fiasco would never have gotten started; the reactors would have shut down safely, end of story. I'm actually amazed that the reactors have held up as well as they have in the face of having no cooling water over a significant part of the fuel rods for this long.

>Nobody is advocating that we build more 4 decade old reactors.

the real political and economical power is with the current nuclear industry which doesn't have other designs. Any permit to build if given in the next 10 years would result in a new old nuclear plant. Like any powerful established industry they protect their position with heavy regulations and wouldn't let any innovative outsiders in.

There are plenty of other designs, most of which get built as test plants, work nicely then never get built again due to political pressure to stick to "safe" designs.