Nuclear power stations are not atomic bombs waiting to go off, and are not prone to "meltdowns".

Nuclear power costs about the same as coal, so it's not expensive to make. Does not produce smoke or carbon dioxide, so it does not contribute to the greenhouse effect. Produces huge amounts of energy from small amounts of fuel. Produces small amounts of waste. Nuclear power is reliable.

Nuclear

The JCO plant needed to mix some high-purity enriched uranium oxide with nitric acid to form uranyl nitrate for shipping. The dissolving and mixing began on September 28, 1999. On the morning of September 30, 1999, three technicians, Hisashi Ouchi, Masato Shinohara, and Yutaka Yokokawa, were running fuel through the last steps of the conversion process. To speed up the process, they mixed the oxide and nitric acid in 10-liter stainless steel buckets rather than in the dissolving tank. In doing so, they followed the practice that JCO had written into its operating manual but which had not received STA approval. For convenience, they added the bucket contents directly to the 45-cm-diameter, water-jacketed precipitation tank rather than to the buffer tank. That was a crucial error because the tall, narrow geometry of the buffer tank was designed to preclude the onset of criticality. In filling the precipitation tank, the crew added seven buckets, amounting to a total of about 16 kg (35 lbs of enriched uranium, or roughly seven times more uranium than permitted under the STA license. The three technicians were working in a small processing bay. Masato Shinohara stood on a platform and was pouring the uranyl nitrate solution into the precipitation tank while Hisashi Ouchi held a glass funnel in an inlet at the top of the tank. The third technician, Yutaka Yokokawa, was seated at a desk approximately 4 meters (13 feet) away from the precipitation tank. At approximately 10:35 a.m. the technicians added the seventh bucket and saw a blue flash. The two technicians near the vessel began to experience pain, waves of nausea, some difficulty in breathing, and problems with mobility and coherence. The gamma radiation alarms activated immediately. The blue flash that they had seen was a result of the Cherenkov radiation that is emitted when nuclear fission takes place and ionizes air. The addition of the seventh bucket had caused a self-sustaining chain reaction. The mixture, in other words, had gone critical. Mixing in the precipitation tank caused the fissile uranium species to disperse so that the reaction fizzled out. However, the critical mass later reassembled, initiating another chain reaction that released more neutrons and gamma radiation. This cycle was repeated several times over many hours.