"Hippies ... turned "nuclear" into a boogieman"
I think any reasonable person would find the nuclear industry has been turned into a dirty dangerous boogieman because of its own actions. Taking just the UK and ignoring TMI and Chernobyl and... there's the mostly-hushed-up-till-now Windscale fire http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7030281.stm, the Windscale/Sellafield sea discharges and inaccurate accounting, the unusable beaches round Dounreay due to radioactive particles, and many many more. I happen to have a little inside knowledge about software development processes in the industry; if they haven't improved, then it's a miracle nothing's gone disastrously out of control.
Remember the post-Chernobyl radiation on the ground in Snowdonia, enough radiation to cause a ban in 1986 on the sale of Welsh hill lamb, a ban which was still in place almost two decades later (and may still apply, I haven't checked lately)? How many people with a clue really believe that the radiation leading to that ban was actually down to Chernobyl and not due to something closer to home, radiation which had simply been ignored till Chernobyl meant the men with Geiger counters had to be called in AND THE RESULTS PUBLISHED?
Boogieman? Go to Wylfa nuclear power station visitor centre and watch the video intro like I did. If you have a clue about the relevant science, and if you can watch for more than two minutes without its lies and misrepresentations making you walk out (as I did), you're misunderstanding something.
The nuclear industry's own people are the liars and boogiemen who were promising electricity so cheap that it wouldn't need electricity meters. We now know that was a lie, and we now know that the cleanup costs in the UK alone will be billions of pounds. The unforeseen (?) cleanup costs were enough to bankrupt the nuclear industry in the UK and the UK taxpayer will be paying for the clean up for decades if not centuries. And the industry's lies continue today.
Boogieman? Check out the industry's record on unplanned downtime. They will tell you that wind power is unpredictable and unreliable, which is true. But is the nuclear industry's record of availability that much better?
Boogieman? If the nuclear industry is safe, why will no commercial insurer touch it with a bargepole, insurers are experts on the economics of risk, so why does the taxpayer have to carry that burden?
Atomkraft? Nein danke.