CASUC needed to die in a fire anyways.
Why would you say this? As noted above, CASUCs were the closest to real reactors we've had in this game. Real reactors use external cooling which is almost always water or water-based. Personally I'm with the guy before who wants the reactor to be a high-power water->steam converter and then have steam run to a turbine or set of turbines to actually generate power. Obviously the piping issue does make this a problem to do standalone at this time, but they sure make a hell of a lot more sense than self-contained reactors using vents and manually-refilled magic coolants. As Morbo would say, REACTORS DO NOT WORK THAT WAY!
IMO the basic ideas of making the nuclear reactors more powerful and requiring more parts was right, but the way this was implemented was absurd. External cooling is mandatory for useful power-generating reactors in reality, so why invent all the silliness that is current-gen IC2 reactor cooling rather than just doing it right?