When we consider nuclear power driving our electricity generation, we immediately hit to wall of fear of anything atomic.
From the 1950's right through to the 1980's, the Soviet Union had been sponsoring the Campaign Against Nuclear Power/Energy protests across Australia and around the world. In Australia this was channeled through the AWU and every year we can recall these protestors marching with the Unions on Labour Day.
Always that nuclear was a short step from the MAD war in the Northern Hemisphere.
This fear was pushed at every opportunity until even the most clear headed and educated started to wonder "Maybe there's something in this danger from nuclear?" Which the media had no hesitation in pushing.
Victoria and New South Wales still prohibit the prospecting for uranium within their States. Meanwhile South Australia sits on, mines and exports several thousand tonnes of Uranium oxide ore to markets around the world every year.
With over two generations of fear mongering, it will take at least another two generations of concentrated emphasis on how the benefits can greatly outweigh the dangers.
As I see it, from media reporting and a few analysts who've been published, the great objections of too long to build, too expensive to build and too dangerous to manage the waste are all readily countered.
The cost and time factors appear to be driven almost entirely by bureaucratic oppositions where the fear of making a decision that will last for decades slows all public servants down. And a fear of litigation based purely on some member of the public being frightened by that fear that maybe, just maybe, radiation from the facility may escape.
As the French have shown, after refusing to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaties that prohibited the recovery, re-refining and reusing the exhausted fuel rods from their power nuclear reactors, it is possible and a practical and an achievable way of disarming the waste argument.
Alan B, I'd like to believe you on the superiority of your Thorium power packs, but if they are so straightforward, surely somewhere they would've advanced beyond simple research reactors?

Fester said "A big shame nuclear energy has been so unjustly vilified by the left, and perplexing as nuclear power is so much loved by their commie mates."

Answer- a Brooklyn Communist is the same as a Manchurian Communist.