No, the reason nuclear is shunned is largely one of cost. Rate payers don't want higher rates. Nuclear has led to huge financial risk displaced to the rate payers, and they don't like it. And they let their politicians know they don't like it.
Well, I think there's more than one reason, corresponding to the multiple points in the posts by trimbo and 205guy.
And one of those reasons is political, independent of finance. I agree other reasons are financial.
The reason I think there are political reasons independent of the financial is because I've seen politicians oppose waste incinerators and windfarms in the face of local opposition, even though they were entirely privately financed.
Politicians in South Carolina and Georgia embraced new AP1000 reactors at VC Summer and Vogtle. It was politically popular to support the new reactors, up until it became clear that they were catastrophically mismanaged financial disasters.
For every community in the US where you can find voters too afraid of radiation to permit reactors, I can find one where voters' first thought about new nukes is enthusiasm over the increased employment and property tax base. But that's a two-edged sword. It's also the local community that is going to be stuck paying off huge costs if the projects go over budget. The recent projects in South Carolina and Georgia went hugely over budget. The SC project has been halted. If the Georgia project finishes it's still going to be one of the most expensive energy projects in US history.
So it would be hard to pitch another AP1000 project in the US today, but mostly because the first ones had every sort of problem that the builders promised to avoid. Less than a decade ago there were a dozen places in the US that had tentative plans to follow up with AP1000 reactors of their own, if the initial projects performed to spec. They've evaporated because the initial projects were years behind schedule and billions over budget. If you want to have a serious conversation about building new reactors in the US, start with the potential host communities that aren't afraid of radiation but are afraid of multi-billion-dollar project overruns. What do you think it would take to build a new reactor at VC Summer now, given the painful recent experience with the AP1000?
