People have a very clear vision of 50 years in the future, it has been a major fight playing out for decades. One side wanted cheap energy and lots of industry, the other side wanted green energy and not much industry. That debate has been ongoing and everyone involved was pretty up-front about what the consequences would be.
The turn away from nuclear power around the turn of the century was probably the decisive moment. From then on it hasn't been possible to articulate a vision of a prosperous society with a realistic path to get there.
Nuclear energy belongs in the "unaffordable industries which failed to adapt" category. They could have maybe eventually reconciled with the safety question and the weapons question, but getting undercut by renewables means that's the way forwards to green energy.
Nuclear has a negative learning curve: the more plants get built the more expensive they have turned out to be.
> Nuclear has a negative learning curve: the more plants get built the more expensive they have turned out to be.
Which is a policy choice that people were pretty clear on when they bought the policies in. That is basically the only way to get a negative learning curve on an exciting new tech like nuclear. Bet you that China is seeing a more natural learning curve.
China seem to be following a "yes and" policy for power: demand is so huge that they're just building all possible types of generation to avoid bottlenecking the construction of any one in particular. Even they seem to have slowed slightly on nuclear since Fukushima and the bankruptcy of Westinghouse (who were supplying one of the designs).
There is very little new with nuclear except bubble money. It’s fundamentally a ton of capital spend with high operational cost and risk.
Would be energy barons like it because it really begs for concentration of generation from a political perspective, as every marginal unit of distributed generation hurts the P&L of the nuclear generator.
The turn away from nuclear power around the turn of the century was probably the decisive moment. From then on it hasn't been possible to articulate a vision of a prosperous society with a realistic path to get there.