Cars have been around a while. However, the Ford engineers apparently forgot the basics of car design. Battery lifetimes are no secret. They need replacing on occasion. For that matter, gasoline mileage of a van is still laughably low at 19MPG. That design is a symptom of a problem. The problem is that American cars are designed to be sold rather than to work. So, engineers change things around in the name of style rather than function. Marketing trumps engineering! The end result is a stupid battery layout like that makes the car become something to be disposed of rather than to be maintained. Naturally, selling more cars due to this is desirable to U.S. automotive companies since car sales in the US are caused by a rather inelastic demand. 
Looking at the Fukushima disaster, I feel the G.E. engineers must have been under similar non-engineering pressures but on a much larger scale. Today's reactors aren't designed to last 10,000 years. Not even close! Otherwise they would likely be large hulking invulnerable pyramid like things made of limestone. Instead, today's reactors are designed with the minimum of materials which should just be good enough to deliver profits for about 50 years give or take half a century. Long term safety is treated as an accessory rather than a fundamental requirement. Squeezing short term profits out of a nuclear facility in the name of shareholder value is the only reason I can see for designing reactors the way they are. I mean, would any engineer thinking even 100 years ahead really put radioactive fuel that is flammable when exposed to air in a swimming pool a couple of floors above the ground in an earthquake zone next to an ocean? Yes, there probably was some savings in land cost. However, I'm pretty sure the shareholders aren't enjoying the property tax savings now!Here is an article on what the experts think is going on in one of the reactors now Very scary!
So, how can the nuclear industry be fixed? Simple. Change the engineering criteria. There is a saying in software engineering. You can make a piece of software better, cheaper or faster. Pick two.
What if we pick only "better" and "faster" in the sense that dealing with nuclear waste eventually needs to get done. Engineers can design bridges for say the "hundred year flood" or in some cases such as the Hoover Dam, the "ten thousand year flood". What is needed is to design a new type of reactor that can be fueled with "waste" material for the ten-thousand year spam of time. The reactors don't need to be particularly efficient. Just incredibly safe. Perhaps they could simply be giant monolithic units that can be shipped to various federal government buildings to be used as heat sources for central heating. Mixing nuclear material with glass and further encasing it in high quality concrete wrapped in thick stainless steel may be an approach that would work. Such units not only would save the government money in future heating cost but their proximity would offer a strong motivation to politicians to have such units produced correctly!
