GMOs are a more complex subject, but as for nuclear power I tend to think that the lack of progress has caused its failure to be adopted rather than the other w

GMOs are a more complex subject, but as for nuclear power I tend to think that the lack of progress has caused its failure to be adopted rather than the other way around. Look at the nuke plants we're building. They are still overgrown 1950s submarine reactors that only make use if about 3% of the useful energy in fissile fuel. The rest is "waste," and reprocessing that waste is expensive and cumbersome. They're also still vulnerable to a whole host of nasty failure modes. The probability of those failure modes has been reduced through incremental improvement, but there has been no revolutionary progress. An analogy: It's as if we invented the piston steam engine and that's it. No turbines, no internal combustion engines, no combined cycle plants, and certainly no fuel cells or thermovolaics or photovolaics or anything like that. That's the situation with nuclear power. We're still building big versions of the Chicago Pile.