Care is certainly called for, but the way it's treated goes too far. Waste is a good example. People insist on perfect safety, and not just for today, but insist on storing waste so that in a hypothetical future 10,000 years from now when civilization has fallen and nobody knows what nuclear anything is, the waste is still safe. This is just not reasonable, and does more harm than good.
The problem is that you get people who think you'll glow in the dark if you live near a perfectly functioning power plant, then you get people on the other side who say it's fine to drink plutonium, and both sets of crazies are louder than any reasonable discussion in the middle.
I think you make a good point. And I wonder if the same criticism could be made about reactor design in general. Why do we need to constanly reinventing the technology, when it was acceptably safe 40 years ago? There is this strange dynamic where people argue vacifeoursaly that nuclear is safe, whilst also wanting to spend vast amounts of money on thorium and other novel designs. Why would that even be neccessary if existing proven technologies are safe?
I think the biggest restraint on the nuclear industry is that it is a complex social structure. Getting many different groups to work towards a common goal is fiendishly difficult. And with nuclear power this issue is safety critical. If the team does not function properly it could cause safety risk. The only way to resolve that premanantly is smaller reactors that don't need such huge teams.
What is the benefit of nuclear if we are left with uncontainable highly toxic radioactive waste? There are already problems with handling waste at existing storage sties. Radioactive waste isn't a problem to be solved 10,000 years from now, it's already a problem. Even guaranteeing safe containment for 50 - 100 years seems like a difficult task, and that is not an outrageous demand for people to make.
Handling waste isn't that difficult of a problem. There are better reactor designs which use a lot of that waste as fuel, and what's left just needs to be sealed up real good and left to sit behind some good fences.
Basically all of the real-world problems with handling nuclear waste are because anti-nuclear advocates prevent any action from being taken to handle waste, but meanwhile there are operating reactors producing waste and that hasn't stopped. So nuclear plant operators are forced into ad-hoc solutions for waste disposal because nobody will let them do it right.
You're simply hand waiving away the problems. Even reprocessing creates waste that must be dealt with. Commercial fast/breeder reactors are always ten years away, and it has yet to be proven that they could even be economically viable.
The problem is that you get people who think you'll glow in the dark if you live near a perfectly functioning power plant, then you get people on the other side who say it's fine to drink plutonium, and both sets of crazies are louder than any reasonable discussion in the middle.