Yet due to fortuitous timing, the movie
The China Syndrome was in it's theatrical run during the Three Mile Island incident. TMI predated both Chernobyl and Fukushima, and was the worst nuclear accident to have happened up until that time. The reactor core did melt at TMI, if you look online you will see pictures taken by robots inside the reactor vessel.
Because the emergency cooling system was functional, the adverse impact of TMI was limited to the venting of a modest amount of Tritium gas from the top of the reactor vessel. The vessel itself was never breached, and even had it done so, the containment structure was intact.
The Chernobyl implementation of emergency cooling was almost nonexistent, and once the fission reaction had blown open the graphite pile and exposed the hot carbon to air, it combusted and spread radioactivity without any containment whatsoever. In Fukushima, once the poorly designed emergency cooling was submerged in sea water by the Tsunami, there was no cooling whatsoever - yet containment succeeded, the only radioactivity spread was contaminated cooling water.
While it is true that nuclear energy generates some nasty high level wastes, there is so much power produced per unit of fuel that it hardly matters. Compare a nuclear plant to a coal plant of like power capacity:
Nuclear - during a 50 year life, will fill a cube 25 feet in size with spent fuel and one contaminated reactor core. With recycling of fuel, just the reactor core itself. If properly managed, zero radioactivity is released into the environment.
Coal - during a 50 year life will generate enough coal fly ash to bury five square miles to a depth of 25 feet - more than 44,600 times the amount of waste produced by the nuclear plant. Depending upon the source and mix of coal burned, the radioactives released by the combustion will exceed the radioactives (contained and not released) by the nuclear plant by a factor of 17X to 220X. Also present in coal stack effluents are heavy metals such as mercury and cadmium, and carcinogens in the partially burned hydrocarbons.
The carbon dioxide released by the nuclear plant is about 15% that of the coal plant. The nuclear plant doesn't release any in operation, but the fossil energy of plant fabrication, plus the fossil fuels used to mine and refine uranium, and to transport ore and fuel and spent fuel, accounts for the 15%.
To me, it seems a no-brainer. We should ban coal and build more nukes. We should recycle nuclear fuel, which will reduce the high level wastes to the reactor structure itself. We should strive to reduce overall energy consumption, and re-implement residential, industrial, and transportation infrastructure towards that same end.
But then, I am an engineer, and I do the math and believe the numbers. Other folks are afraid of Godzilla.