There was an obvious path that the environmentalists mostly opposed. A decade is plenty of time for massive scale buildout of nuclear power. If we'd started that a decade ago we'd be in a good position now.
Edit because I forgot to mention this, if coal or ccgt were regulated like nuclear is, not a single one would be profitable. And even if you take into account every single death due to radiation poisoning (from any source) nuclear would still be the safest power source in the world. Literally worker deaths from installing wind power plants exceed it.
The costs are high, because construction industry has suffered from poor productivity growth for decades. Renewables are getting cheaper, because they rely more on mass-produced stuff and less on hiring people to construct a big specialized building to house the power plant. Regulatory costs of nuclear power also largely come from poor quality control in construction industry. Regulators require something specific, subcontractors try doing that but often don't get it right, and regulators order them to tear it down and try again.
It is hard looking at Vogtle, Virgil C. Summer, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3, Hinkley Point C, Hanhikivi and the countless cancelled projects and think: ”That’s what I want some more of!!”
I remember seeing just a few years back, a Greenpeace postlet moaning about dangerous nuclear energy
I think it's pretty clear that nothing meaningful will be done because there's no shock value to entertain the "empaths" like there is with war and other stuff
The entire Western world (with the exception of France) pretty much stopped building nuclear power plants 40 years ago, because of a single accident that by its most pessimistic estimates killed fewer people in total than coal emissions kill every 3 days. It’s madness.
In hindsight it’s much easier to blame the accidents rather than face the structural problems nuclear power has.
Which has only been exacerbated by renewables and storage disrupting the global energy markets, forcing ”baseload” plants to become peakers. Against their will.