Admiral Nimitz himself, as a big proponent of nuclear powered ships, was much less enamored of commercial nuclear power. He felt that without military discipline to ensure that guidelines were followed, accidents were likely.
I don't agree that nuclear fission is safe. We have already had too many incidents, way too many permanently despoiled areas like Hanford and other poorly run nuclear production facilities in other US States, an entire river system in Siberia that is so radioactive that a five minute exposure on its banks would be fatal. And then there is Chernobyl and now Fukushima, both of which involved a huge amount of human error and cost-cutting decisions that created the conditions for the disasters. There is no reason anymore to believe that the same stupidity won't ever happen anywhere else, or that some natural or human-caused disaster would be made so much worse by the failure of nuclear containment.
There are much safer, less expensive ways to produce power, we shouldn't be playing with the nuclear genie. It really isn't worth the risk.
BTW, I don't mind at all that we do research on fusion power, but it is almost completely unrealistic to expect it to work, or to even believe that it would be all that safe. Fusion requires extreme conditions, and plenty of hot particles are produced that would make the walls of the reactor extremely radioactive.
My last point is to mention that the reason why most fission fuel is not reprocessed is that it is very difficult to do and hazardous in the extreme. Just look at the mess around Hanford Washington where fuel was processed for bombs, for just one example of how dirty and dangerous this is. It is cheaper and easier to start out with raw uranium.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
