Every power generation method has its plusses and negatives. I don't know if the risk from an SMR incident outweighs other methods, but it sounds promising. We certainly need an alternative to sources we know are bad (coal, oil, etc).
Human beings are just utter crap at intuitively estimating risk.
Also, COVID (to round out the top three in many places).
These risks are not of the same class.
* admittedly I'm exaggerating slightly by not considering private and military aviation, but I'm too lazy to find that total.
The people who prioritise 0-risk living over energy security are self defeating; but the problem is they keep trying to take the rest of us down with them. Their victory against nuclear energy might technically be one of the biggest catastrophes to ever hit humanity. We have never been hit by something else with so high an opportunity cost in absolute terms. Blind and ignorant fear is no basis for making policy decisions.
Defaulting to extreme skepticism and caution towards any technology that dangerous is not a bad starting point though.
For the fuckwits in any given electorate, your maxim would be better phrased as "default to not having any fucking opinion at all on that of which you know not"
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout]
For actual studies on the impacts, see [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11109179/]
Notably, Stronium-90 levels in deciduous teeth of kids born in the 80's.
"Strontium-90 concentrations in deciduous (baby) teeth of 515 children born mainly after the end of worldwide atmospheric nuclear bomb tests in 1980 are found to equal the concentrations in children born during atmospheric tests in the late 1950s. Recent Sr-90 concentrations in the New York-New Jersey-Long Island metropolitan area have exceeded the expected downward trend seen in both baby teeth and adult bone after the 1963 ban on atmospheric testing. Sharp rises and declines are also seen in Miami, Florida. In Suffolk County, Long Island, Sr-90 concentrations in baby teeth were significantly correlated with cancer incidence for children 0 to 4 years of age. "
Stronium in teeth is a proxy for Stronium in bones too, and those don't fall out.
It's like worrying about the KGB covertly planting listening devices in your house while tech companies are openly planting listening devices in your house. It's not at all unreasonable to be concerned about invasion of privacy, but the people who think they're at significant risk of being individually targeted by the security service of the former Soviet Union because of what they saw on TV have got a screw loose.
The counterargument is that blowing up a train or stealing a truck usually doesn't poison the local area for generations. Higher risks means some consideration is due. If the stakes are higher but the probability is the same, the expected value is still higher.
I for one don't want to live in a hellscape pockmarked by miniature exclusion zones.
The market has spoken on that matter.