So many things! The country that had generated the most nuclear power IS the United States and it's also the one with the highest capacity https://en.m.wikiped

So many things! The country that had generated the most nuclear power IS the United States and it's also the one with the highest capacity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_by_country The depiction of it as a "failure" is the industry whining like the defense industry whines about not having 50,000 more airplanes Despite being at scale and having 70 years to bring down costs, it's still prohibitively expensive in the full lifecycle analysis of the LCOE and it gets heavily subsidized to keep plants open. People's energy prices have gone up because governments are Interfering With The Market in favor of nuclear: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the-us-is-spending-billions-to-keep-money-losing-nuclear-plants-open.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/17/the-us-is-spending-billions-... Also it's not green. The mining of the fuel isn't, nor is its transportation, vitrification, fabrication, refinement or enrichment. The concrete and cooling of the plant isn't nor is the waste stream side of the equation. It's the classic hyperfocus on a small part of the chain and writing off everything else as externalities. Now on to the last point. Yes! The back end is a trivial cost because it Has Not Been Dealt With. Yucca Mountain 35 years in still has not been built and the only US site that currently exists is only for 10,000 years (1% of what's required), only does nuclear weapons, cost $19,000,000,000, took 29 years to build, and had a sealing schedule of 75 years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant Currently the only US option is dry casks which have a shelf life between 30 and 100 years assuming no natural disasters, terrorist attacks, wars, or shoddy craftsmanship. We're leaving this problem for future generations. In the same way people used to hunt animals to extinction so they could sell them as culinary delicacies, future civilizations will look back on us and curse us for being so stupid when we had far more reasonable options readily available that didn't require literally centuries of management. Onkalo is going to get breached in the next ice age btw so let's just hope we figure out how to secure it against that in the next few generations I don't care what your sci-fi shows say, it's a shit technology. And I haven't even touched upon the insane corruption behind plants such as Diablo canyon. But hey call me an uninformed moron, I'm down