>> I already consider France to have achieved success, they just need to keep it up

> We (I'm French) try hard, but couldn't adequately built any new reactor since 1999.

France is not what it used to be. On the other hand, that statement has been true for a while. (France used to be the dominant power in Europe for almost 1000 years.)

> Indeed, however it seems to me that the level of trust gets lower even in those nations(?). See local 'Pirate Party'

Still, Northern Europe + Switzerland has way higher confidence in government than France:

https://data.oecd.org/gga/trust-in-government.htm

> Indeed, but on this very account trust on nuclear was already dented because many don't see past accidents as 'minor'. This may be wrong, but they sure don't want to be exposed to such risk.

Common people used to believe the earth was flat, even a millenium or two after the Greeks knew it was round. Even today.

> Indeed, however the case at hand is difficult to settle even among them because there are reasons to think that 'renewables' can be sufficient, and therefore to prefer avoiding problems raised by nuclear (risk, waste, dependency to uranium, daunting decommissions...), reasons to think that the level of risk associated to nuclear plants is higher than estimated or would become intolerable if we build many of them...

"Renewables" sound good. "Nuclear" sounds scary. "Chemotherapy"/"radiation therapy" sound scary while "Energy Crystals" sound good. Most cancer patients will still chose the treatment recomended by doctors, because they trust him/her.

Trust like that, is built over time.

>> there are two "camps", each with their own, non-overlapping Overton windows

> There are! And the integrated window defines the very limited spectrum were politicians seeking power are constrained.

At the point of elections, public opinion has already been set. The shaping of public opinion is mostly not done by politicians, though. But politicians is noe group that can affect the institutions that shape public opinion.

> There is no sure source clearlyu indicating what is preferrable, or even (esp. outside of pure mathematics) what is really 'true'.

You realize that the sentence above is logically inconsistent with itself? ;)

Seriously, though, properly executed science is the best approach we have to determine the level of confidence we can have in certains sets of propositions. (I believe this almost axiomatically, since even the way I come to this conclusino is based on scientific thinking.)

Someone who is reasonably bright and educated in the metods of science will have some ability go to the literature and investiage for themselves. I can, by using math, common sense and personal experience come to the conclusion that the earth is roughly spherical. (Primarily by flying to different places, and notice what path the plan is following, and the evalute what hypothesis (round vs flat earth) explains the path best, with the common sense element being that the airline wants to minimize fuel consumption). I can do similar investigations in most of the "hard" sciences, and so far, my investigations have been compatible with the scientific consensus, where one exists.

In the social "sciences", this becomes much harder. At best, their predictive power is weak. In many cases, they seem like they're simply rationalizations of a previously held ideology.

Climate science, cosmology and economy are fields that I find to be somewhere inbetween. With good methodology, you can make some predictions, but the error bars are really huge. (For cosmology, we will obviously not live long enough to see the outcomes.)

But the medical significance of exposure to radiation is pretty hard science. Error bars are relatively small when exposure is large enough to create measurable increases in cancer risk. This is also what matters to a given individual that is exposed. At doses lower than 100mSv, especially if spread out over weeks or years, there is simply no reason to be scared.

We know pretty well how much risk comes with an exposure of, say 200, 500, 1000 or 5000mSv. Near the top of that range, there is reason to be VERY scared. But even at 1000mSv, you'll probably live.

We know this for similar (and largely overlapping) reasons that we know that radiation therapy (for some set of patients) reduces their likelihood of dying when they have cancer.

> In theory it can be done, but I'm not aware of any historical success.

I think there is a lot of science that is being taught with reasonable success in schools, especially hard sciences. That includes things like the health risks of radiation. (Certainly, I learned the basics in school.) For subjects where there is a lot of knowledge, a lot of the effect has to do with repitition, practical experiments, excercises, etc.

Obviously, there will be students that find any subject involving numbers and calculations to be hard, but if one can reach the other students, thay may be enough.