There is no firm evidence at this point that the use of MOX fuel in Unit 3 has complicated or made the overall event worse in any way. Pu production is a natural consequence of the use of LEU and most of the added Pu is burned up fairly early in the fuel cycle because of it's enhanced fission properties. So I don't see any compelling reason to abandon it at this point.
If you're referring to advanced fuel cycles or thorium-based systems then it's going to be a tough go at least initially because of the huge investment in the LEU/LWR infrastructure. Until there is a market-driven reason to move away from that, I don't see much change in the near future.
2. Nuke plants need to think more about the SHTF scenarios and start modeling some really big crapstorms that include such things as “OK, you’re going to be cut off from the outside world of resupply for 30 days. How do you use what is on-site to get back to a stable state?”
I don't have a problem with reasonable thinking-outside-the-box exercises, as long as they don't go hog wild into unreasonable scenarios. I've seen editorials and blog postings faulting the Japanese nuclear program for "ignoring" evidence of tsunamis in the past that reached up to the lower slopes of some of the nearby mountain ranges. Well, cripes, you're talking about events millions of years passed in that case. It is simply unreasonable to single out a particular industry and hold them to standards that are based in data millions of years in the past, when no other industry has to do likewise.
Thorium is one idea out there now, for certain. I agree that there’s a big infrastructure startup cost, but thorium is so plentiful that the sooner we get started, the sooner we can reduce our energy costs, IMO.
As for the disaster planning: I’m not so much talking of planning for huge million-year volcanos, quakes, etc. I’m talking of just better self-reliance for the plant infrastructure. For example, I have a hunch that it will come out in the analysis of Fukushima that they didn’t have anyone on staff who knew that much about diesels. They didn’t have a plan for what to do if the diesels got flooded, etc. I’ve seen this again and again in high-tech companies that had diesel backups - they had no one on staff (formally) who knew what to do if the engine didn’t start. They simply assumed that “Hey, we paid all this money for a backup genset system, we test it once a year... so we can just assume it is going to work.”
OK, oh-so-very-brilliant-MBA’s in management... what it if doesn’t? What then? Call the local diesel shop at 0300? Um, that’s not a way to achieve the uptime promises you’re making to customers.
That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. I’ve seen no shortage of this short-sighted thinking that “Oh, it will just work,” followed by “and we outsource the maintenance and repair to reduce staffing costs....”
This leads to some rather unexpected (by management) failure modes. For want of a farrier, the horse couldn’t go to town to get help ... that sort of thing.