As a pro-nuke Green- my thoughts
The biggest issues folks had with nukes before TMI and Chernobyl accidents were the mantle of secrecy and associations with the national security state that prevented a factual assessment and remediation plan of nuclear energy's risks.
Windscale and other near-accidents (there was one near meltdown in Ohio contemporaneous with TMI that would've really been tough to deal with) were ignored by the press and really didn't impact the safety culture of the nuclear power industry as much if they'd gotten more play.
Chernobyl was a mixture of really bad safety design, operators doing something really risky with no safety margin, and Murphy going nuts. Horrible for the crews that had to deal with it, but as far as disasters go, traffic any given week killed more people than the accident is likely to.
Transient Radiation exposure =/= cancer risks as much as people think. Sure, hanging out near a 50kt nuclear blast is really bad for your long-term health (you're getting exposed to gamma plus fallout) but getting 10 X-rays over a month as the fallout plume washed out of the atmosphere isn't.
Cesium and Strontium isotopes are nasty b/c they hang around and mimic calcium so if they're ingested and taken into bone marrow the radiation exposure continues for years. Don't drink milk or eat contaminated food by said fallout plume, and I seriously doubt any long-term effects reduced anyone's lifespan in that plume.
Fukushima was a mixture of bad siting, bad safety engineering, and a 2,000-year 9.0 quake + 100' tsunami all but ensuring failure. Add in TEPCO getting no political pressure to ensure better safety practices or upgrades by the Japanese govt and it's a damning argument whether we humans can make toast much less make nuclear fission happen safely.
I'm hardly a nuclear engineer, but it seems the political hairball re: disposal of nuclear waste (spent fuel rods, mostly) is the elephant in the room.
NIMBY has become BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything Else) where zero risk is the only tolerable risk.
My opinion is, make sure only 1-3 sites do nuclear waste reprocessing to ensure adequate security and have breeders force transuranic wastes down the decay ladder to far-less toxic and gamma-emitting isotopes to reduce the unlikely event of folks deciding to use it for bombs but mostly, not present a threat for thousands of years into the future.
Go for a phased-transition to thorium MSR reactors that are a lot safer vs LWR uranium-fueled reactors. It won't be like the atompunk AEC pamphlets used to trumpet "power too cheap to meter!" but it would prevent the thousands of coal mining deaths as well as deaths due to air pollution due to coal-fired plant air pollution, mercury contamination, etc.
