Imo, the fact that the world didn't put a huge dent in global warming by building lots of nuclear plants is one of the saddest "misses" of our recent history.

Imo, the fact that the world didn't put a huge dent in global warming by building lots of nuclear plants is one of the saddest "misses" of our recent history. This I feel is due to irrational, emotional public opinion. Nuclear is the safest cleanest and most stable energy source we have so far but it's also "scary" because radiation is spooky and invisible. Coal is simple and local and it just silently kills millions through pollution. It's similar to the common fear of flying vs the common non-fear of driving. Even today when people talk about the "cons" of nuclear power (spent fuel management, risk of catastrophe, terrorist target, etc) they are usually oblivious to the fact that there are 450 active NPPs today, and they are supplying 10% of the worlds energy and things are going great.[0] So even if these were acute concerns (and they're not) we would only have needed to increase them by a max factor of 10 to get 100% non polluting energy. That's not a lot, and definitively worth the "hassle". Even in Chernobyl (which was the main reason for the doom the nuclear effort) the number of casualties due to radiation, including long term effects, are estimated to be in the thousands, not millions as most people assume. [1] In Fukushima that number is 1. [2] The number of NPPs were growing exponentially until suddenly plateauing globally since 1987 til today [0]. This is because building a new NPP is very expensive, time consuming, and since Chernobyl, headline-grabbing. Keeping an existing one running on the other hand is almost free, and a non-issue. The other culprit is the fact that it seems that NPPs are not dominantly cost-effective as of now [3]. If they were, then maybe savvy entrepreneurs would have found a way to circumvent the public opinion and convince governments to build them. But as it stands, no one has the incentive to push this agenda: Not businesses, and not politicians who couldn't stand the backlash (on the contrary, France, who leads the world with 75% reliance on nuclear power, wants to reduce that number to 50% by 2035 because that's the will of the people [4]) In a (better) parallel world, the people would demand more nuclear power and get the governments to subsidence the costs to make it cost effective and removing the reliance on coal. Instead we're building wind turbines and solar panels that are so unreliable they stop producing energy when there's no wind or it's cloudy/night. I think it's quite clear that these green technologies can't really be effective at a large scale (at least without some major break-throughs), but it's what the people demand, so it's what we do while we continue to burn coal. [0] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths_due_to_the_Chernobyl_di... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa... [3] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537816/why-dont-we-have-more-nuclear-power/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/537816/why-dont-we-have-m... [4] http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-clarifies-French-energy-plans http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-clarifies-...