Nuclear plants are designed to handle tornado type winds -235 mph plus. The Turkey Point plant was right in the eyewall of Hurricane Andrew, and I seem to recall that they measured 145mph before the anemometer failed. Most have containment berms and other protective measures that would keep storm surge from being much of a factor.

Take a look at:
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/gen-comm/info-notices/1993...
and
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/gen-comm/info-notices/1993...

Key lesson "learned" from Andrew is that while containment and safety systems do ok, all of the support equipment gets trashed so the plant is down for an extended period of time.

Texas officials spent all day Tuesday debating whether they should issue a mandatory evacuation (1,000,000 people) for the Rio Grande Valley, and instead pulled the FEMA people out and moved them to Austin "out of harms way."

Meanwhile, the forecast track has changed.

Since Rita, I've heard a lot of people say "We're staying right here" if it happens again. It was insane putting people out on a highway (and away from food and shelter) when they would have been better off at home. I think it's going to take a Katrina level problem, rescuing people from their rooftops, before an evacuation order is taken very seriously, given how poorly the forecasting has been.

On Sunday they were evacuating the Florida Keys. A couple days before that they were talking about Miami getting wiped off the planet. Yesterday it was Brownsville. I know I'm jaded, but it's just too fluid right now. By tonite they'll be saying Beaumont is in the crosshairs, probably.

The nuke plant is a good ways inland...about 30 to 40 miles at least. No storm surge problem there. Been a while since I drove by it but I remember lot of concrete so I'll guess wind won't be a problem for the plant proper. The transmission lines are a whole different game though.

After watching the latest N.O. evac seem somewhat unnecessary and remembering all the horror stories from the Rita evac I suspect many won't leave. But I just watched the latest loop of Ike. He's really assymetric...the east side is really strong and wet. Even if he hits 120 miles SW of us there could still be some serious problems here. Especially with electrical loss. Lots and lots of trees around Houston = thousand of downed lines.