NEW YORK -- The nuclear power industry's chief advocate plugged his industry's safety and fiscal future today in an invitation-only presentation to investment bankers.

Marvin Fertel, president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said public opinion about nuclear energy in the United States has recovered since the Fukushima meltdown in Japan last year.

His industry, he said, operated without major incident last year, despite enduring 11 more refueling outages than the previous year and "a series of tornados, a major hurricane, Midwest flooding and an unusually large East Coast earthquake."

Fertel acknowledged that U.S. attitudes about nuclear energy have suffered in the wake of the Japan disaster, but he said public sentiment has since recovered to levels consistent with pre-Fukushima. He cited polling conducted by Bisconti Research Inc. and funded by NEI that shows approval for nuclear power dipped from 64 percent in February 2011 to 46 percent after the March accident; more recently, approval has risen to 62 percent.

"It should come as no surprise that the accident at Fukushima had an effect on public opinion, ... but it's recovered," he said, arguing that the tsunami was what impaired the plant at Fukushima, not the earthquake itself or radiation leaks.

"No one has been killed at Fukushima by radiation," he said.

Fertel also revealed that the industry spent $7 billion on capital improvements last year, 70 percent of it on equipment upgrades. This figure does not include $750 million for the proposed high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., or money spent on new power plant proposals.

Fertel said nuclear capacity in the United States will see a better environment for new construction when the price of natural gas rebounds to more competitive levels. Until then, he appeared to admit the electric power sector would be more bullish on gas-fired generation.

"We really don't expect natural gas prices to stay at $2 to $3 [per thousand cubic feet] for the next 40 to 60 years," he said, citing data from the Energy Department that suggests 220 gigawatts of new power will have to come online by 2035.

"The long-term fundamentals have not changed," he added, in reference to coal-fired plants shutting down at a relatively rapid clip. He said nuclear power will have to be part of a "portfolio approach" to replacing coal and meeting the predicted surge in U.S. demand.

Fertel also cited the expected approval of a new nuclear reactor design at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the first since 1978, as evidence that the industry is here to stay (see related story).

Anti-nuclear activists dismissed Fertel's speech as more of the same from an industry that is headed the opposite direction of the "renaissance" it would like to see develop. They noted that 2011 saw the collapse of the Calvert Cliffs expansion in Maryland and a project in South Texas; they also said that of 31 new reactor applications on the docket in 2009, only the Vogtle expansion in Georgia and the V.C. Summer project in South Carolina remain.

"One out of 10 projects still in play is not a 'nuclear renaissance,' it's an industry meltdown," said Leslie Anderson Maloy of the Hastings Group.

Peter Bradford, professor at Vermont law school, took issue with Fertel's statement that radiation hasn't killed anyone at Fukushima. "The levels of radiation exposure caused by that accident are such that a substantial number of fatal cancers (as well as other cancers and birth defects) will result," Bradford wrote in an email. "We won't know whose cancers and other illnesses are caused by Fukushima or how many of them occur, but this will not be an accident without radiation related fatalities and injuries."