The activists of the 60s-90s were witnesses to the nuclear bombing of Japan, domestic nuclear accidents, as well as a nuclear arms race that threatened to wipe out all of humanity. It is unfortunate that we threw the baby out with the bathwater when it came to nuclear power generation, but the people who had issues with nuclear in that era did have good reasons to be afraid.
That's not supported by physics. Even at the worst - if the other reactor had somehow also melted down, that still wouldn't have caused a major climate change event. It would have been absolutely terrible, regionally, but not globally. Nuclear reactors aren't atomic bombs.
I don’t understand. Plenty of climate change related developments are regional. See: the increasingly devastating hurricanes forming in the Gulf of Mexico. Not every single thing that we attribute to climate change has to span the entire globe.
Yep. Also, the pro-nuclear techno-utopians of that era promised that nuclear electricity would be too cheap too meter, nuclear-powered cars would be common, and quite a few other things.
If the public doesn't understand complex new thing X, and advocates for X have obviously told them all sorts of lies - yeah. Don't be surprised if the public becomes extremely skeptical about X.
