Something that isn't discussed enough is that nuclear power is extremely safe. According to Our World In Data (https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy), it produces the fewest emissions per gigawatt -- solar and wind both have substantial overhead -- and the second-fewest deaths, after solar, of coal, oil, natural gas, biomass, hydropower, wind, solar, and coal. The misguided perception nuclear is more dangerous is due to its unfortunate habit of clumping deaths. People remember Chernobyl, but not Bill, who died mining coal, even if there are a thousand Bills all over, their total deaths dwarfing Chernobyl's.
The climate activists should really be advocating for nuclear. It's cheap, has the lowest emissions, and is really safe. But, of course, people will object. It's hard for PR to say that, even if you can show the data. People rarely change their mind because of data.
Also you can't really make meaningful conclusions based on that plot due to obvious reasons. It only includes "Number of nuclear reactors shutdown worldwide". The construction peak was ~1980. The oldest commercial plant was opened only 68 years ago and obviously the early plants much less safe and had a shorter lifetime which introduces another bias...
There has been a generation of activists and NIMBYs campaigning and protesting to artificially inflate the cost of nuclear, while having this delicious benefit of now being also able to claim about the cost of nuclear.
The ballooning of costs is not even significantly due to changing safety requirements, but often due to compliance and environmental requirements. Those are political requirements that could be removed in one fell swoop.
This was the original dream from the 60s, where we would be building so many plants that the power would be too cheap to meter.
This of course is nonsense because it requires the entire industry to ignore market conditions for no good reason. You can't fight the market, not on a large scale, and especially not in the US. Power plants are only built if they will be profitable in a reasonable time frame. If power was too cheap to meter then nobody would be building new plants, there would be no return on the investment.
This is also why nobody builds nuclear power plants anymore. They are too expensive to build and can't compete on price. Especially not with renewables cratering the price. There's a reason solar installs are outpacing even the most optimistic projections from a few years ago. You can argue theory all day long on the Internet, but the people doing the actual work have made their decision.
The climate activists should really be advocating for nuclear. It's cheap, has the lowest emissions, and is really safe. But, of course, people will object. It's hard for PR to say that, even if you can show the data. People rarely change their mind because of data.