I always wondered if the Leidenfrost effect wouldn't make the water cooling highly inefficient. Seems like it turned out that way...

Will there be a "supergau" in the near future? Or is it implausible ?

Looks like the "super-gau" already happend.
The nuclear power plant "Fukushima" has been evacuated of all personnel, because the radiation is rising.

I think that effect doesn't apply if the whole thing is drowned in water.

I know this is realevent to most of you. http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE72E3ZO20110315?ca=rdt . Germany is shutting down it nuclear plants.

Personaly I still think nuclear power is a safe reliable source of energy. Thousands of people die in car accidents every year and we still all drive cars. But then a couple dozen people die in a couple nuclear accidents over the 40 years or more we have been useing nuclear power and everybody freaks out. Just a thought

msmith: You are absolutely right. But our government makes a nice trick here. This is an old power plant that should be closed anyway. They just sped it up a bit.

Which shows that you haven't thought about it long enough. Seriously.
Maybe you should read what happend in Tschernobyl and what became of Pripyat and then think about what you just wrote here.

The Russians didn't handle it with the proper care (since the mistake was due to the mistake of one man. That's how it works in communism), and Europe doesn't have these severe earthquakes. It is very safe to operate a nuclear power plant in Europe.

The trick is something else: Thoses power plants (they want to "shut-down" 7 as far as I know) won't be shut-down forever. They're just not active for a few months while security checks are being made and after that the politicans will come back and say that everything is fine and switch them back on. If the media has not already forgotten about that shit by then.

@Joozey: Well, so we can store the radioactive-waste in your basement? What I mean is: Sure we have no major earthquakes here. (there are smaller ones in some parts of germany) But nevertheless technology can fail and the amount of damage if a nuclear power plant fails is so much bigger than in any other case that you just cannot call it safe. Furthermore there is still no method of handling the radioactive-waste and store it in the future.

This Nuclear Powerplant debate in Germany is silly.
We shut down working powerplants, and then
Poland for example build a new powerplant at Greifenhagen, right
at the German border (140km from Berlin), and sells the Electricity to us.