Personally I hate the nanny state, and have great fun reading things from England (which is the worst) and cringing when I hear it in the US in all its forms, which include - but are not limited too - zero tolerance anything, mandatory minimum sentences, and government actions in places they should not ever go into, like say, bedrooms, or how many vibes you can buy.
That being said, I'd also have to say as a small 'd' democrat, that I do see a role for government in the modern world. And one of the governments jobs ought to be in taking steps to make sure that the 'public health' as broadly defined, is looked after.
Now, often that is a balancing act. The issues of public health rub up against economic development, and the need for energy (and, not to be forgotten in this conversation, issues of national security and national power in the form of nuclear weapons - all these nuke plants started out under a program called 'Atoms for Peace) and have to be balanced out.
When the Atoms for Peace program started, the power industry (the power companies themselves, the construction companies like Bechtel and KBR, the people building the components like Westinghouse) looked at building plants. Of course, in that process, they talked to the insurance companies (cause business don't do nothing without insurance) and the carriers looked at the plants, at the risk of failure, and the price of failure.
And the insurance companies came back and said - no can do. The cost of a catastrophic accident would be more then the company could absorb. Then the government got all the insurance companies together, and they ran the numbers and found out that the liability for a catastrophic accident would be more then they all had together. So, the government, under the guise of defense issues really, passed the Price-Waterhouse Act (I'm pretty sure of the name, real sure about the law) that basically exempted all that stuff from liability lawsuits. Sure, if you slipped on oil at the TMI plant (remember, the other reactor there is still running) you could sue, but if TMI 1 blows up, and you lose your house, farm, business, industry - you can not sue.
That seems like bad government to me.