Corporations and governments use ad campaigns effectively all the time. I'm convinced that if you took a fraction of that fusion money and bombarded people with "nuclear is fine" ads for a year or two, public opinion would change. If a TV show can swing opinion one way, why can't something else swing it back?
'Nuclear is fine' ads would work until the next misstep, which the negative proponents will be looking for.
Generally, it was looking good until the Fukushima disaster. It resets the clock and that clock takes 20-30 years to play out.
On the 30 year timescale, all the gen 1, 2, 3 designs have flaws which make them potentials for issues. It doesn't even have to be a big issue, just enough for the press to catch it and push "See, they said it was safe... it's not!".
That flaw makes me want to just skip fission all together =/
In addition to "nuclear is fine", I would add that fusion is not as clean as the public imagines. It is being promoted as power generation without nuclear waste, but in reality you are going to get at least mildly radioactive fusion chamber cladding, which will have to be replaced yearly or so. So there will be a huge pile of radioactive waste generated over the lifetime of fusion power plant. This is in addition to a little problem of fusion power being 25 years away for the last 60 years or so.
The reason we don't have fusion is that we keep looking for above break-even (and for proper fusion power plant we need ratios way above 10:1, afaik) in aneutronic fusion.
If we accepted neutron radiation in the process, which is what would lead to radioactive fusion chamber cladding you mention, we could have broken even already - the experiment JET reactor had the design capacity to run at above 1:1, but wasn't equipped for the damage from neutron radiation.
Breaking even in fusion puts you where fission was in 1942. And that's just a step. The engineering obstacles to practical fusion are enormous, far greater than those facing any advanced fission reactor scheme. I very seriously doubt fusion will ever be practical.
1. The quantity of activated material in a magnetic continent fusion reactor would be orders of magnitude less than what is produced (the exhaust is not radioactive).
2. We get to close the radioactive components. It is much more manageable to put up a sign that says “No entry until 2100” than it is to put up a sign that says “No entry until 30000”. The public at large cares about this.
The "quantity" is less in the sense of amount of radioactivity. But the MASS of activated material can be very large. It's not nicely bundled up in easily removed sealed fuel elements.
The biggest problem with this radioactivity is that it renders the reactor inaccessible to hands on maintenance. Everything would have to be handled by robots. I'm reminded of how they handled that at Hanford in WW2: they demonstrated the reprocessing equipment could be maintained remotely by first assembling it remotely. I'll believe a fusion reactor can be maintained if they do the same thing and build it with robots.
