why we don’t rely on nuclear power plants more, especially these days
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There are multiple practical concerns and one big, big emotional one.
First, constructing any new energy plants is time-consuming. It takes tons of legal red tape, environmental studies, land acquisition, and regulatory hoops to jump through. Nuclear power has exponentially more challenges than others, including obligations to groups like the DoE, international nuclear energy regulators, and every gladhand and grandstander in the state and local governments.
Second, nuclear power is not completely clean. While the big white clouds are just that for the most part, and the water pumped out of a properly functioning system is safe enough to drink, there are waste and byproducts. Fuel rods can’t just be used until they’re no longer radioactive – they have to be radioactive to a certain point or else the system can’t work efficiently. So used rods are still dangerously radioactive, but have no use in that reactor type, and have to go somewhere else. The same is true of many other byproducts, especially anything use in cleaning up an incident. With radioactive materials, the time until its safe to be around can be minutes to longer than the age of the universe. They gotta go somewhere, and nobody wants ’em. (There are reuses on the horizon, like fusion or breeder reactors, but they’re not commercially viable yet).
And then there’s the BIG one.
The two biggest media complexes for serious matters are those of the USA and Russia. Japan listens to the USA, China to Russia, etc. Both had major, major nuclear incidents during the Cold War. Russia had Chernobyl and Khysthm. The western world had Three Mile Island, Windscale, Fukushima, etc. Each took lives and left patches of land either uninhabitable or scary to survivors. Nobody wants that kind of fear in their lives, even if it is irrational. Nuclear accidents are rarer than fossil fuel accidents but the spectre of Nuclear Power (bombs?) haunts the psyche and makes nuclear power plants very unpopular.
Even nations that haven’t had major nuclear accidents like Germany are slowly turning off their existing plants. New plants in the post-industrial world (UK, USA, France) are almost unheard of. Last I checked, only the state of Georgia is constructing a new plant in the USA. Meanwhile, developing nations like India and China are willing to “roll the dice” on that possibility as they try to create electricity for their growing industrial and luxury needs.
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