Somebody (or two) way back in this post suggested that Britain's nuclear power stations were all about making bombs. Spot on! The first magnox (so named because of their magnesium innards) reactors were indeed built for the production of plutonium, a scarce commodity at the time. Naturally the government weren't keen to stress this point so, as a by-product, they managed to get some electricity out. The efficiency was quite pathetic.
The fast breeder reactor was to be the mother of all plutonium factories. You run the thing on plutonium but pack it round with cheap(ish) U-238 which is otherwise useless for fission. The neutrons pouring out from the core turn it into plutonium. It never really worked.
Now that the cold war is over there is a huge surplus of unwanted plutonium sloshing around the planet just waiting for terrorists or rogue states to steal it. It seems a little too much of a coincidence that soon after BNFL admitted the apparent loss of a substantial quantity of plutonium (don't worry, it's only an accounting error) Isreal suddenly had their first nuclear bomb!
The advanced gas cooled reactors (AGRs) were the first genuine attempt at making electricity. They work but suffer from the same problems as any other fission reactor. The fission products are many and dirty.
Hot fusion is still in its infancy but shows some promise. The most successful attempt that I know of used deuterium lithium fusion and ran for a few brief seconds. Another version of hot fusion under investigation involves imploding vacuum bubbles. For those whose maths isn't up to it, when a spherical vacuum void in a liquid collapses the liquid's velocity reaches infinity at the centre - then it stops dead. Result, a point of infinite pressure. That's the theory. The 'bubbles' are formed using ultrasonic waves.
The first cold fusion experiment was a complete and utter shambles, a catalogue of shoddy science overwhelmed by greed. Everybody wanted a bit of the action before anybody even knew what was going on. (My own suspicion is that it was an exothermic reaction between monatomic (nascent) deuterium and the electrode.)
Fusion is not particularly clean. You have to be very careful with free neutrons. There is no container that can hold them. They have a half life of about fifteen minutes and can easily travel over a thousand miles in this time. Because of their ability to transmute elements, every material must be chosen with great care. A simple magnet made with friendly cobalt 59 could so easily turn into a rather nasty piece of cobalt 60. Having said that, the light elements are so much more predictable than the heavy ones used for fission. There's just no contest in the cleanliness department.
When you get down to nitty gritty there are only three energy sources we can use - and two of them are nuclear. Solar power in one form or another has kept this planet alive since the first plant-like organisms evolved. Fossil fuel is just solar power in the bank. Geothermal power (also nuclear) is a relative newcomer to most of us. Europe is actually blessed with a vast natural source of this stuff but there's a slight problem; how do you lay a power cable across 600 miles of Atlantic Ocean? The third option is to tap the kinetic energy of the moon. That's what tidal power stations do. I quite like this idea but then I don't live on the Solway!
