A few months earlier, the company had claimed that "oh yeah, we checked that, everything's fine!" and employees were later convicted for providing false information to and hiding evidence of the leak from government inspectors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Besse_Nuclear_Po...
Humans being terrible at something, at some time in the past, is not a sole reason to write off the technology. The response should be to rather focus on improving the process and policy rather than shrugging off nuclear which IPCC has admitted is necessary to meet our climate goals.
Most American's are very worried about dying from terrorism while most are actually being killed by heart attacks.
At a certain point it is a matter of what people want to believe and what is actually happening on the ground.
But we didn't even become more careful with existing reactors. The companies running them kept being textbook capitalists and cut costs wherever possible. Outsource maintenance to questionable Eastern European workers. Inspections reveal unexplainable micro fractures near the reactor core? Just declare it safe and carry on. Workers on-site monitoring the operations are retrained electricians, because well, both things have something to do with electricity right?
I'm not afraid the technology is inherently unsafe. I'm worried because it's run by companies maximizing profit, and regulated (indirectly) by politicians caring about getting re-elected, and maybe about their hometown/electoral district.