The United States government was one of the leading advocates for nuclear energy prior to the
1966 Detroit Disaster. It even had an entire government agency in charge of promoting it called the
Atomic Energy Commission, and with the backing of the
Joint Committee on Atomic Energy the Commission could do just about anything. The two were in the process of planning a major new reactor development program for 1967 that Congress was going to sign off on. Before Detroit
a sodium cooled design was the leading contender, and then support switched to
a molten salt design after the incident due to its safety advantages. The molten salt reactor program and
renewal of the Price-Anderson Nuclear Insurance Act barely passed in 1967, but nuclear energy never really took off like predicted. In 1976 the United States government agreed to buy out commercial nuclear power plants to create USAtom, doing for commercial nuclear energy what it Amtrak did for commercial rail.
I'm wondering if nuclear energy could have ever been a major source of electricity in the United States, especially from private utilities. USAtom worked great at boosting efficiency, raising capacity factors, and lowering costs at its nuclear power plants starting in the 1980s, but some American utilities are the size of countries. Alternatively, how could something like the USAtom approach have been adopted earlier? I know there was some talk of a federal nuclear utility when Price-Anderson was being created, but it took until the 1976 renewal of Price-Anderson for that to really be taken up.
Also, how might Detroit have evolved if not for the Detroit Disaster? The city was one of the largest manufacturing centers in the world before it occurred and the birthplace of the American automobile, and now it and the surrounding areas of Michigan and Ohio are basically ghost towns. The manufacturing industry was going to consolidate after the Second Great Depression in the 1970s, but it seems everyone decided to consolidate away from Detroit.