MIT designs floating nuclear plants (newsoffice.mit.edu)

A new design for nuclear plants built on floating platforms, modeled after those used for offshore oil drilling, could help avoid such consequences [as the lack of cooling for the reactor cores, due to a shutdown of all power at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant complex during an earthquake and tsunami] in the future. Such floating plants would be designed to be automatically cooled by the surrounding seawater in a worst-case scenario, which would indefinitely prevent any melting of fuel rods, or escape of radioactive material.