Given that nuclear power is significantly safer than other forms of power, are you asserting that the risks of self-driving cars are more about PR and perception than actual risk?
Scientists are in the best position to influence the public and push for change. It is astonishing that scientific organizations have been timid about nuclear energy, or outright against it, because of a few people with the most extreme, empirically unjustified stance.
Part of my point is that you might think that the game is "scientists vs. politicians, ignoramuses, and fear-mongers," but that's not the case. Sometimes they're all on the same side. Imagine a 4 player split-screen Star Fox, where the scientist leaves their controller and helps the others shoot down their plane because they don't think they can win. If that sounds baffling, it is.
We could have had your safe nuclear power involved in every road accident. Yeah!
Maybe a better analogy is driving a car, that is, nuclear power and self-driving cars are both vaguely like driving a car.
However, my intuition is that nuclear power has less variables than driving a car. I say intuition because I don't know much about neither.
I think the point is that self-driving cars trained on poor data are no better than poorly trained superhumans at driving.
During the cold war they launched fission reactors into orbit. That probably had more variables. Then again, since the nuclear airplane project was unsuccessful, maybe that had the most variables of all.
Putting a nuclear reactor in space (as we still do, I think the most recent Mars rover had one) greatly reduces the risk of it directly causing deaths, since it's really far away from humans for most of its service life.