The nuclear everyone is afraid of was from an era where priorities 1-9 were making plutonium for nukes or justifying massive uranium centrifuge farms for making weapons grade material.
Priority #10 was making safe electricity. It honestly was more of a waste product from making nukes instead of the point of the plant... It's not a coincidence that nuclear build out matches the cold war era perfectly. Once the cold war ended the US and allies didn't need more nukes to make weapons with... The priority became stabilizing the Petro dollar, which nuclear helps undermine by decoupling nations from being dependant on USD and US treasuries.
Fast reactors and LFTRs are god awful for nuclear weapons (why they weren't made beyond pilot plants or a few examples that exist purely to complicate my point) but are some of the safest designs for new gen IV reactors.
Fast reactors literally burn nuclear waste from Gen 2 plants...
Liquid core reactors can be built in two halves—the heat retaining high reactivity core, and the heat dissipating passively safe container you drain into in an emergency through a freeze plug. That plug works as long as gravity doesn't go away.
Fast reactor waste is safe in 300-500 years, and they can actually be designed to run on existing nuclear waste as fuel. Even the stuff we can't burn currently that has half lives in the hundreds of thousands of millions of years.
Thorium breeder reactors are the future for long term base load stability I think. Its not the only solution to our energy needs though but it's a very attractive option.