Newer reactor designs can avoid these issues.
On a personal note, I grew up about 10-15 miles north of San Onofre, and I don't think many folks had an idea of how poorly that facility was run.
I have a fundamental mistrust of the industry and our government's ability to properly regulate it. That mistrust is based on historical facts.
Even with newer designs, I think human error and regulatory capture is too dangerous to make nuclear viable.
What historical facts would those be? Historically nuclear has been about the safest form of mass power when looking at accidents:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents
Anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than the reality. A recent example would be the evacuation at the Oroville dam - almost 200,000 people were forcibly evacuated since the worst case failure scenario would have have been a tidal wave of water 30 feet high rushing down stream. This made the news for maybe a day. Can you imagine the type of coverage the media would have given if 200,000 people had to be evacuated near a nuclear power plant?
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/12/us/california-oroville-dam-fai...
NASA has estimated that using nuclear power has saved an estimated 1.8 million lives that would have been lost if the power has been replaced by coal/gas: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/903/coal-and-gas-are-far-more-...
(And yes, I know the people who oppose nuclear power usually will say they don't like coal and natural gas either, but we are going to need a predictable, reliable form of base load power for a long time. One of these three ways of generating electricity has much less health consequences than the other.)
So what does that tell you about the motivations of much of the movement that opposes nuclear and fossil fuels? They're not motivated by continued human flourishing, that's for sure.
Note the change from nuclear to coal.
Just so you know, you get more radiation from coal burning plants than nuclear plants.
Don't believe me: http://boingboing.net/2011/08/18/what-fukushima-can-teach-us...
Original paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/108/35/14422.abstract
tl;dr: Fukushima radioactivity measurements regularly get swamped by radioactive sulfur from coal burning plants in China.
Meanwhile how many people have died in propane bottling plant explosions? In coal mining? In off-shore drilling incidents?
It's not perfectly safe, not even close, but it's statistically one of the least dangerous power generation methods.
A lot of stuff that is theoretically guaranteed to be a disaster looks very safe and profitable until shortly before disaster strikes.
People are worried about automation, the nation that can cheaply power automated factories and server farms in the future will prosper.
