With enough effort pretty soon you have a good foundation of useful rubes who will repeat your claims ad nausea as fact. The claim that nuclear has mostly come

With enough effort pretty soon you have a good foundation of useful rubes who will repeat your claims ad nausea as fact. The claim that nuclear has mostly come to a halt because of fearmongering is one such claim, easily and completely disproven with even the most cursory of analysis. Somehow it comes back from the dead as if it's just those pesky fearmongers, and not nuclear's horrid history (not in accidents or deaths, where it has done spectacularly, but in pure economics), that's to blame. Most nuclear builds in the west saw extraordinarily little opposition. Ever. We saw a massive spike in builds that went on for a few decades, but it slowly sputtered to a halt because of real-world economics and utilities becoming jaded. Economics that saw that nuclear was overhyped, and the process around it (a process necessary for a platform that can cause enormous economic and ecological damage if it goes awry) made it much less of a win. Not one nuclear plant has been delayed or not built because of the Yucca Mountain issue (which is a classic issue where you're asking a jurisdiction to take the problems with none of the benefits). Dry cask storage is doing fine. We're just entering the period where nuclear power plants are nearing end of life stages, where countless billions in costs are going to come due that everyone just whistled and looked the other way about. The massive nuclear hype was courtesy of the 1950s style new age everything is better enthusiasm, and was critical for building out the grid, and is still a very important part of the mix. However they aren't being built because of some soccer mom nattering about Fukushima, but instead because the people who run the energy grid are choosing much less expensive options. Wind and solar are much less expensive full stop, and gas turbines are cheaper because no one has to pay for the carbon released, which has its own problems that we're going to pay a heavy price for.