Unfortunately, political courage is in short supply. I did, however, find it profoundly interesting that BOTH presidential candidates embraced nuclear power (of course, the one that lost would have been incapable of promoting it because of all his IOUs to the non-nuke crowd).
I think you're probably right. I'll give Kerry some measure of credit for providing verbal support to the industry, but if he were elected it probably would have gone the way of the Clinton years, benign neglect, with cancellation of a useful program here and there at the national labs (e.g., IFR at Idaho).