I think any unbiased analysis would agree with you but it's such a hard sell for an obvious reason: if you ask people what is the first thing they think of when you say "nuclear," a few will say power, but most will say "bomb", "holcaust", "meltdown", "winter," "Chernobyl," etc. My nuclear engineering is weak, but I do know humans pretty well, and as far as most of them are concerned, the word "nuclear" is itself is radioactive. Engineers are reasoning people living in a world populated mostly intuitive people who live in a world of simple images. You say "nuclear" and most of us hear "radioactivity from Fukishima in my tuna fish." The biggest thing that the engineering community could do to promote the new generation of nuclear power is to call it something else! This isn't cynical--today's nuclear tech is as different from that 1970's tech as burning oil and gas were from burning wood or coal. We don't just lump all those together as "fire technology!"