That sort of blind trust in "engineers" is part of what the recent report on Fukushima criticizes. For instance, look at how the spent fuel rods were managed, putting them in large pools of water inside the reactor enclosure. That doesn't seem especially safe to me. Couple that with not having any contingencies to pump the necessary water into the pools to keep the rods covered if the main power blew out. The result was that awful hydrogen explosion that sprayed large quantities of radioactive material into the atmosphere and the Pacific.
These plants are based on General Electric designs that are something like half-a-century old now.
If anything the problem was too little "politicization," in the sense of active regulation of the industry by government officials. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission also suffers from "regulatory capture" by the industry being regulated. Then there was the "regulation" of oil drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. We all know
how well that turned out.