Sorry for the slow reply, been covered up with work and horse stuff.

I'm not an advocate of polluting, but I am an advocate of common sense. We have to weigh our risks. IMHO the risk of nuke problems is less than the health problems produced by coal fired power plants due to the quantity and type of pollutants emitted. 80% of Frances power comes from nukes. How many problems have we heard of? Yeah... see what I mean? Controls have come a LONG way since the days of Chernoble and TMI. Chernoble was caused by the typical over zealous communist "get-r-done" attitude. They had a known equipment problem, however a middle manager in an attempt to not disappoint his supervisor pushed ahead with a planned test of the reactor. It was easily avoidable. They should have prudently not run their scheduled test and the whole thing would have never happened. TMI from what I understand was caused by an instrumentation failure coupled with a lack of procedure and know how.

I'm sure they could be made smaller, but it's an economy of scale. Most nuke plants have a higher output than a coal plant of similar foot print. Also, given the cost of many of the components, I don't know if building multiple small facilities would make any sense. You would have a lot of duplication of jobs and that would push operational costs higher.

The thing that makes the nuke plants look big is the cooling tower. Sadly enough, you have a lot of heat that has to be dealt with and that's the best way to do it. If you just dumped or diluted the hot water into the rivers, you would cause all sorts of other ecological problems.