There's a lot of hope in the future for nuclear power plants. Not fission however.

Japan conceded to France to built ITER, the testing site for all future fusion power plants. ITER (pronouced like "sitter")
is being built in France and hopes to start the fusion reaction in 2016. The deal is that if it's built in France, the majority of the engineers and workers are Japanese, though it is an international project.

Basically it's a tokamak reactor (a huge magnetic torus used to hold in the plasma, suprisingly an older technology than most think. Invented in the 50's by Russians) with some of the newer fusion ideas incorporated.
http://www.iter.org/

Until then, I'm all for Fission plants. They're clean, efficient, and the fuel lasts a LOT longer in smaller amounts. There's the waste issue involved, but once fusion becomes a viable resource, I can see most of the nuclear reactors getting filled with concrete.