Unfortunately, the experience is said to have soured Carter on nuclear power even as it, perhaps, demonstrated that the dangers were exaggerated, given that he did live to be 100.

Thus, instead of championing a French-style "all nuclear, all electric" response to the oil crises of the 1970s, complete with indirectly nuclear-powered interstate trains à grande vitesse and the continuation perhaps of Alvin Weinberg's work on thorium, Carter dialled back nuclear expectations and preached a more dismal message of putting on another sweater: thus setting the nation up for Reagan's vacuous grin and 1980 election tag-line "there you go again."

And set the stage also, in a closely associated fashion, for subsequent climate change denialism: all the more ironically so given that the 1973 science fiction hit Soylent Green was set in a 2022 in which anthropogenic global warming had withered the crops, as is made plain some six minutes in:

"SOL (Edward G Robinson): How can anything survive in a climate like this? A heat wave all year long.

"SOL AND THORN (Charlton Heston) (together): The Greenhouse Effect. Everything’s burning up."

That was a moment in which things could have gone either way.

Thus, had Carter, America's only president to be trained as a nuclear engineer, not been the hero of a nuclear accident back in the fifties, we might have had more policy realism about nuclear power and climate change in the 1970s Anglosphere and a 21st century USA that was more like France: a country which has massively decarbonised from a peak of 13.2 CO sub 2 equivalent metric tons per capita per annum in 1973 to 5.0 metric tons pcpa today, mostly thanks to the mighty atom as it would seem (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-ghg-emissions?tab=chart&country=~FRA).

(I realise wind and solar are cheaper now, but that wasn't the case in the 1970s.)

All this reminds me of a great line in an otherwise somewhat special-interest engineering video about NASA's current Artemis Program and its shortcomings as compared to Apollo, in which the speaker says how curious it is that in time travel movies everyone is always terrified of going back and changing the world by some insignificant act like stepping on a butterfly (Ray Bradbury, 'A Sound of Thunder,’ 1952), yet we fail to grasp that we have the same power and, indeed, responsibility to change the future right now (video in question here:, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJsPvmFixU, time travel analogy at 37:05+).