>...Does anyone honestly think the United States has institutions sound enough to safely manage nuclear power over multiple decades?

All indications are that much was learned by industry and the NRC after TMI: "...The NRC said the TMI accident also led to increased identification, analysis and publication of plant performance information, and recognising human performance as “a critical component of plant safety”. Key indicators of plant safety performance in the US have improved dramatically. Those indicators show:

• The average number of significant reactor events over the past 20 years has dropped to nearly zero.

• Today there are far fewer, much less frequent and lower risk events that could lead to a reactor-core damage.

• The average number of times safety systems have had to be activated is about one-tenth of what it was 22 years ago.

• Radiation exposure levels to plant workers have steadily decreased to about one-sixth of the 1985 exposure levels and are well below national limits.

• The average number of unplanned reactor shutdowns has decreased by nearly ten-fold. In 2007 there were about 52 shutdowns compared to about 530 shutdowns in 1985."

https://www.nucnet.org/news/three-mile-island-led-to-sweepin...

No one ever promised that there would never be a nuclear accident - that would be unrealistic for any power source. But historically nuclear power has been much safer than all the alternatives that have been available. If only other power sources were as safe:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the
media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so many people have an understandable misperception that it is more dangerous than other sources of power. 200 thousand people had to be evacuated in CA a couple of years ago because of a lack of maintenance on a hydroelectric dam could have let to catastrophic failure. We got lucky that time as the rains stopped just in time, but how much did the media cover that story? How much would the media have covered that if 200 thousand had been evacuated because of a nuclear power plant?

A recent Harvard study shows that pollution from fossil fuels is much worse than previously thought and they estimate that it is responsible for more than 8 million people yearly. We need to move away from burning fossil fuels and we need to use all the tools that are available.

https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2021/02/deaths-fossil-fuel...

It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. In that case - great! But... what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Texas has shown us what happens with even a small disruption of energy. If it came down to a situation where you were forced to choose, would you prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?