The thing is, physics said that the titanic could sink. Physics says that a nuclear plant can't critically melt down a-la Chernobyl. A terrorist's bomb, similarly, is going to have a hard time being stronger than an earthquake of magnitude 8.9, which left every single reactor undamaged - and, somewhat ironically, if they'd simply kept operating there would have been no issue because they could power their own cooling, but of course there was no way to predict that, so shutting down was the right thing. I think that what we need to take from this is that no matter how much we plan, and how much we try to minimize the worst case scenarios, they'll still happen, and we need more than 8 hours of battery backup for the cooling systems.
Still, coal will run out relatively soon, as will every non-renewable source (Soon in generational terms, rather than traditionally soon), and as our power requirements grow (Which they will), taking huge amounts of energy out of the earth could start to have serious concequences. You can't create new energy, so however we do it we're taking power from somewhere - I'd rather it was a controlled nuclear fission reaction, rather than the thing that keeps us alive. Of course, it's a moot point anyway, because we're really just waiting for sustainable fusion, then we can stop these silly discussions and start on the important things like warp travel.