I have a childhood friend whose parents (yes, both of them) were nuclear physicists. They are well into retirement now. I know that they say nuclear energy is the cleanest stuff out there, but that people are very afraid, largely because of 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl. I haven’t talked with them about this, per se, but in general, I would say that they believe nuclear energy is clean, safe, and reliable. Not trying to put words in their mouths, but that’s the way I recall our discussions on the topic in the last 15 years.
On the other hand, the nuclear physicists that were my professors in college indicated that nuclear power was too dangerous to put into the hands of people who get bored with routine. On a slightly different topic, they also scoffed at the notion that fusion would be a clean source of energy. They said, “My God, man, where do you think all of the heavy elements come from? They come from the solar forge!”.
I have a brother-in-law who worked at Idaho national labs. That lab was tasked with figuring out how to deal with nuclear waste. He said that they knew how to deal with the waste by putting it in Glass somehow. But they wouldn’t tell anybody because it would do away with their jobs. I think there are something like 8000 people working there in Idaho Falls. These people needed their jobs to sustain the local economy and far beyond. Why would they want to find a solution? It wouldn’t be good for the budget.
We did a tour of a nuclear facility & 3 Mile Island was brought up. The operator stated that when the incident started, the system was in the process of shutting down but the operators couldn’t believe what they were seeing so they interrupted the shutdown process creating the disaster. If they had allowed the process to complete, we’d have never heard about it.