One note on alternates

Fusion would be viable in about a decade if the funding had kept up. During the 60s and 70s, there was a lot of money flowing into Fusion to try to harness the Fusion reaction and keep the chain going. The problem with plasmas is that we don't understand them as well as we would like. Plasmas have a tendency to do strange things and these strange things can cause a reactor to shut down for saftey reasons.

Also, you are correct on the fact that people freaked out far more than they needed too. It didn't help that the media during the time of TMI misquoted information. One of the things I heard about while going through the accidents (TMI, Chernobyl, and Windscale [British accident in the 60s]) was that the radition that was recorded at the exhaust outlet from the pressure vessel of the reactor at TMI was being quoted by the media as if it were the radiation level at the gates of the site. During the accident, the radiation level at the site barely went up, it was a miniscule amount above backgroud at the plant gates.

Needless to say, there are more people to blame for why we don't use nuclear as much as we were projected too, and some of that blame can be squarely placed on the nuclear industry for not dispelling myths, half-truths, and outright lies that were tossed around concerning nuclear power. One of my favorites is the people that say that a fission reactor can detonate like an atomic bomb which is patently untrue for power reactors (although I have heard a rumor from one of my old professors that one of the test reactors, Godiva created by Los Alamos, was tested out in the Nevada test range to see how much power it could produce and it detonated (it was setup similarly to how the Little Boy bomb worked, except that the extra piece was allowed to pass through the smaller piece and was designed to test fast neutron reactors, but instead of letting the piece fall through as normal, they blocked it so it couldn't and when you have something that is the right geometry and density, well...boom!).