I'm going to lay the blame fairly and squarely on the Simpsons.
Seriously.
The show is the only mass market show that I can think of that is continually giving nuclear power (in general) a bad reputation and because of its popularity amongst young people, it is helping to prevent the adoption of nuclear power, even though the technology is much safer than earlier implementations.
There's a few nuclear power plant on Long Island that never got started due to Three Mile Island :\. Also, Brookhaven has a few nuclear reactors for research purposes that are still used as well. In the late 60's or early 70's, they (the power company, now known as LIPA, but this was before NY State took over) started to constructed a commercial nuclear power plant.
It was originally supposed to output ~550 Megawatts of power and cost ~75 million to make. Then it got delayed. They went back to planning stages and increased the output to over 800 Megawatts as well as designing plans for another two reactors. However, one reactor was close to Manhattan. That one never got past planning stages due to protests. The other one never got built either. I'm not sure why.
Anyway, by the end of the 70's, the cost of the original plant had skyrocketed to over $2 billion. And it wasn't even finished yet. Then there were protests due to Three Mile Island. By the mid 80's, the plant was complete. However, politics deemed that it would never be opened. So they spent another $250 million to decommission the plant. It cost around 6 billion in total.
And a few years back, anyone remember the big blackout that happened? Power grid got overloaded. There's a cable that runs under the LI Sound now that draws power from Connecticut's nuclear power plant. Around 330 Megawatts of power. By comparison, the unused nuclear power plant on Long Island - that's still connected to the power grid - is supposed to be able to produce around 400 Megawatts of power.
Oh, and we (the taxpayers) are still paying the bill for that unused power plant. And will be for the next 15 years.
I think so too, but it shouldn't. Chernobyl was deemed unsafe by the US before it was even built, and Three Mile Island didn't hurt a single citizen, and I believe killed no one.
Seriously.
The show is the only mass market show that I can think of that is continually giving nuclear power (in general) a bad reputation and because of its popularity amongst young people, it is helping to prevent the adoption of nuclear power, even though the technology is much safer than earlier implementations.