I think the biggest issue with nuclear energy is public trust. It was broken with Chernobyl, and broken again with Fukushima. I've always been pro-nuclear, and

I think the biggest issue with nuclear energy is public trust. It was broken with Chernobyl, and broken again with Fukushima. I've always been pro-nuclear, and have spent a lot of time arguing why it's better than many of the alternatives, especially coal. But people just don't trust it anymore. It may not be a problem in China, but in democratic countries it's a big problem. One of the things I and many pro-nuclear people claimed was that todays reactors were designed with so many safeguards and precautions and what-ifs that the risk of a large scale disaster was so slim that it could pretty much be discounted. Chernobyl was an understandable one-off. And people believed this story. The public's perception of nuclear energy was just about recovered when Fukushima happened. Fukushima exposed real problems with TEPCO and their planning that went undiscovered by Japans nuclear agency or the IAEA. You would think that they would have planned for this worst case scenario, but they didn't (they did not expect a tsunami to knock out the generators). So how can we expect people to feel safe about other nuclear plants? We can again try to explain all the safeguards, but they will remain unconvinced because the trust is again lost. Like if you tell an airline passenger that it's extremely unlikely for turbulence to cause damage to the aircraft and then half a wing breaks off, they're not going to trust you again no matter what you say, even though what you said was true. So now we will have to wait even more years to gain the trust back by having a perfect safety record. Except for the next 20 years or so we will have gradual news to remind us about Fukushima as they bit by bit disassemble the plant and learn more about what exactly happened in the reactors.