At the time of the TMI incident, I was working concrete on what I believe was the last nuke plant built in the US, Shearon Harris in New Hill (Raleigh) N. C. I watched dumbfounded as 200,000 idiots fled screaming into the night in Penn. No civilian outside the TMI fence was ever exposed to an amount of radiation equivalent to a single medical X-ray. No doubt, more people died in traffic accidents in the evacuation than suffered the slightest ill-effect from released radiation, since the latter number is zero.
Jimmy Carter, your "huge proponent of nuclear power" helped kill it by making it illegal to reprocess spent fuel rods in America as part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The French, having the good sense to not sign that spectacularly ineffectual bit of nonsense, thank us, they get that business now. We are still trying to bury a rich source of new energy in Yucca Mountain when we ought to be recycling it. If it's hot enough to be dangerous, it is by definition a better source for new fuel than any natural ore on Earth.
The redundancy built into the plant I worked at had to be seen to be believed. New pebble bed reactors would make even a TMI accident impossible, they don't require coolant flow at all. We could be generating at least 50% of electricity by emmission free nuclear power if we had not gone into full-scale recto-cranial inversion over anything nuclear.
Russia and Chernobyl have nothing to do with commercial nuclear power. Chernobyl, and twenty some still operating plants in Russia, are essentially jumped up versions of Enrico Fermi's original graphite pile in Chicago. No containment, great risk of warping the fuel rods to make withdrawing them impossible.
Cannot let this pass: some two hundred Russian volunteers responded to Chernobyl by getting close enough, long enough to put out the graphite fires and start the process of containment. They did this KNOWING their exposure was lethal, but knowing the job had to be done somehow. The survival rate of these hot-zone runners was ZERO! They are too seldom recognized as the true heros they were.
You are right on. You might be interested in my webpage on nuclear power at http://RussP.us/nucpower.htm . It features several articles by Bernard L. Cohen. Don't miss it!