Popular support for nuclear energy is higher than you’d think after the Fukushima accident, people are aware there is a climate crisis going on.
The light water reactor has two problems: (1) Russia is the only country that is really building them on a N-th of a kind basis, everybody else is building them so sporadically each is practically first of a kind. France was approaching where Russia is 30 years ago but they gave up, Korea wishes they were where Russia is but they are not, China wants to be where Russia is in ten years and maybe they will be. (This is the possibility of Russia endangering Zaphorisia NPP would be such an own goal.)
(2) is that the economics are not great even if people could build NPPs without screwing up and it is not just the nuclear island but the heat exchangers, steam turbine and balance of systems. There is the hope that the parts of an LWR can be put together in some way at some scale that deletes some expensive systems, there is the most enthusiasm now for GE’s BWRX300, but you have to not only do that but push through the growing pains to get N-of-a-kind economics.
Now it is not impossible that some other reactor type that runs at higher temperatures could lower the cost of heat handling but that’s not an easy route either since all kinds of practical problems involving materials and such need to be solved. On the other hand, the impact for the future of humanity could be priceless. It’s quite the problem that the U.S. gave up on the fast flux test facility and that we’ve lost 30+ years of progress we could have made on next generation reactors, there is serious talk of building all kinds of test reactor today that we should have been having 20 years ago.