&gt; given its historical context of not being a very successful industry at all.<p>Your metrics for &quot;success&quot; are interesting:<p>&gt; It&#x27;s more expensive than the alternatives, including wind and solar now.<p>According to [0] only onshore wind beats nuclear in terms of cost. However, that does not include the scaling issues wind has if you want to produce as much total MWe as a nuclear reactor (ex: there is only so much high quality wind onshore land).<p>&gt; Its failure modes have so much more potential to be catastrophic.<p>This is the same logic for many anti-terrorism bills, but I will ignore that for now. This is also why they are regulated to such lengthy extremes, such as having backup power both <i>onsite and offsite</i>. It is also required to withstand winds that occur only once in 10,000 years.<p>&gt; The industry has a terrible record of cheating on nuclear waste disposal. Much of it is dumped at sea in secret because the cost of legitimate disposal is so expensive it would make the industry commercially unviable.<p>Sources? Much of it I know of is stored on site in giant pools because the waste belongs to the DoE, and the DoE <i>still</i> cannot find a compromise on how it should be handled.<p>&gt; Human error is common and impossible to eliminate. The nuclear industry is somewhere the human factor has been historically disastrous and it doesn&#x27;t seem likely that will change.<p>Replace &quot;nuclear&quot; with anything else and it is just as true. For example, structural engineering has had millenia lengths of time over nuclear to rack up disasters.<p>Ultimately, nuclear accidents amplify human error to a magnitude that many people find uncomfortable. Which is why the industry is regulated to a magnitude more than any other. It is not like they hand out reactor operator licenses to just anybody, either. 1 out of my undergraduate peers of ~7 got licensed to operate NCSU&#x27;s PULSTAR research reactor, which has much simpler systems than a commercial power-producing reactor. It is also easy to forget that the nuclear industry in the USA has been near-paralyzed at the 1950&#x27;s and 1960&#x27;s level of technology, which is only about 20 years into the commercial reactor field. Unfortunately, there really is not any other industry I know of that, at 20 years into its growth, was paralyzed and allowed to operate for an additional 60-70 years. In that context, I think the US has done well given the little wiggle room regulation has allowed growth in.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cost_of_electricity_by_source#United_States" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...</a>