Water and sewage plants are usually public utilities so the owner is less likely to flee without paying the clean up costs (or sell it to a third party who tragically go bust shortly after leaving no liability for the previous owner), plus the pollution they generate is significantly less toxic.
You're right of course, and drawing any correlation between a nuclear power plant (or any electric plant) and water treatment plants seemed silly at first. They light up whole different areas of the brain. I started asking myself, why is this so?
Have we become conditioned to think of electricity as something aside from a dire necessity?
Water and sewer plants are usually sited geographically, and people tend to settle along lakes, rivers and coastlines. Our city is fortunate to be within a gently sloping river valley so treated water is carried to the tap and wastes to the sewer plant mostly by gravity alone. You could be shown a blank topo map of most areas and draw a circle where each plant should be.
Power plants follow a similar rule of minimizing distance from their primary loads. Our grid was built out as-needed and not for surplus. Therefore aside from a few sad glaring exceptions such as the de-population of Detroit, one will never spot an electric plant somewhere on the landscape and conclude, an electric plant is no longer necessary here. Natural gas plants are being built to supplant coal generation on the grid so there is an emerging phenomenon where a plant here and there is deemed obsolete because "electricity is being generated elsewhere, cheaper, today." In many cases this is being played out by cents on the kWh, where the demise of something locally 'irreplaceable' is triggered by investor sentiment from the glut of natural gas distribution. Some day (perhaps sooner than many think) easily extractable natural gas will peak and begin its inexorable decline, and residents will turn once again to coal. Because of the ridiculous impossibility and expense of completely dismantling coal generation plants, that plant will still be there.
A properly operating sewer plant removes human toxicity from the environment, making its water discharge safe for human contact and subsequent drinking water treatment plants downstream. Likewise, a properly operating nuclear power plant is the only viable industrial-scale way to remove human toxicity from burning fossil fuel from the environment.
Despite its vilification and shortage of investment, the nuclear industry has innovated. The Candu and AP1000 light water reactor are the most "walk away safe" designs we can muster from the inherently dangerous combination of fission and water. Molten salt reactors could take this many steps further. Though the radioactivity of the salts is extreme the fissile is bound to the salts and your worst case scenario is a real mess, but it is a manageable mess that would remain there waituing for cleanup, not seep into the environment, as Tepco attempts to chase down Cesium tainted water molecules dispersed to air and sea.
It is my personal belief that every utility class wind farm will be a silent rusted blight within fifty years, and the electricity customers of those regions will be struggling to overcome the financial hardships imposed by them --- both the subsidized cost of their construction and insufficient generation over their brief lifetime --- but principally the wasting of human resource that diverted them away from better paths that could have been taken.
Central to all this is the question, do we think there will come a time when we simply do not need this (or that) nuclear power plant anymore? Decommissioning mentality not only forces your hand in that decision, by making nuclear power more expensive than it really is, it encourages a more insidious 'disposable culture' thinking, can't we just close this thing down and buy cheaper power over the wire, or elsewhere, today?
Which is why Americans no longer make things, use newly printed virtual currency to purchase consumer goods from China. The tide is turning on that and we'll see how it ends.
