That if a racoon saw you swimming, it would swim out to you and sit on your head and drown you.

My fully adult mother actually feared this was something that could happen to her children, and she warned us of this “danger” every summer when we were young.

Easy. Have nuclear power plants operate as government run and backed corporations (what we’d call a “Crown Corporation” here in Canada).

That way you can mandate safety and uptime as metrics over profit. It may be less efficient from an economic standpoint (overall cost might be higher), but you also don’t wind up with the nuclear version of Love Canal.