It certainly doesn't seem to have panned out at all. Indeed, there are countries (eg, ie, Germany) that have moved away from nuclear; as far as I've been able to tell with the backing of the environmentalists and to the detriment of the actual environment.
I really have to hold myself back from ranting about comparisons of countries using nuclear compared to their next door neighbors who do not. I've seen precious little evidence that nuclear power is anything but a positive for the environment compared to what people actually do in practice.
But the environmental movement absolutely seems to hate it.
Four reasons, really: trust, militarisation, cost, and worst-case.
Trust: long history of people claiming this stuff was "safe" then it turned out it wasn't. All the way from radium watch paint to dumping nuclear waste at sea.
A lot of the hatred of nuclear by environmentalists is personal; remember when the French security services blew up the Rainbow Warrior for campaigning against nuclear testing?
Cost now looks unfavourable compared to renewables. It can't easily be improved without concerns over safety. The reactors also take too long to build. We can build renewables much faster and cheaper, which will fill the gap.
Worst-case: Fukushima is moderately bad and has left a big unusable zone. Chernobyl was worse and briefly contaminated most of Western Europe; it still leaves 20% of Belarus' agricultural land unusable.
Trust: true. all industry, science suffers from this. commercialization and pragmatism rule. But, nuclear suffers more than others because we chose to ignore love canal type damage and focus on radionucliotides, in weighing up the risk/reward view.
Militarisation: also true. we're having a minor resurgence of concern about neonicatinoids. That aside, people tend to downplay the risks inherent in most biocides, for this purpose. I think the limited use in the syrian war has played to this: we all know things have been used (tm) and we're all secretly breathing sighs of relief that they appear to be less useful than we thought, if just as evil and scary to suffer. The nuclear arsenal isn't going away. But, brazil has no nuke warheads. Germany, turkey, sweden.. its a bit list of people with a civilian nuclear industry and no warheads.
Personal: I think this is the killer reason actually. I think people don't feel willing to flip on this issue (I used to work casually in the FoE office in edinburgh and I attended the torness demos back in the '70s. I changed my mind)
Cost: Most of the cost inflation feels to me like opportunistic side effects of the planning delay. Nuclear reactors for the small market in strategic icbm submarines have cost overruns but I am less sure the nuclear component of their build is responsible. None the less, civilian nuclear build out is insanely expensive so in the 10-15 year spend cycle, bang-for-buck from PV/Solar is hugely big by comparison. 20-50 years, I suspect its less clear but re-capitalizing newer PV/wind would probably work over time. Shorter field life, but better RoI is undenyable. But, at a lower power intensity.
Fukushima. I tend to believe the unusable zone is shrinking but I also think it was a clusterfuck only the japanese could have come up with. Their socio-political-civilEng culture tends to do things for maximum harm. Look at Tsukiji relocation for a non-nuclear instance of insane bad planning: relocate the fish auction to .. an industrially polluted site none of the fish merchants want to occupy ... WCGW?
Graphite reactors didn't make much sense to me long term. Windscale fire.. wasn't that also graphite core?
I hate to do this, but I feel like this is bringing historical steam engine boiler explosions to the table discussing current technology. pebble bed, 4th gen are a long long way from graphite. Maybe its me but this feels like re-stating the personal-hatred thing.
I'm not so pro-nuclear I'm blind to reality. I think my original statement stands: in the 15-20 year planning cycle it looks impossibly hard to make it fly economically, socially even though in energy intensity terms, its a better long term bet.
I like PV and Wind. I think emerging battery and pumped hydro makes more sense, but we should not be blind to the damage Dams do, to the environment. PH may actually be better in that score, less stable, unmoving deep cold de-oxygenated water. Overall, I think more renewables make a damn sight more sense than burning coal, gas or wood.
I really have to hold myself back from ranting about comparisons of countries using nuclear compared to their next door neighbors who do not. I've seen precious little evidence that nuclear power is anything but a positive for the environment compared to what people actually do in practice.
But the environmental movement absolutely seems to hate it.