There’s a specific kind of online commentator that’s a carrier of the meme that the public turn against nuclear power was the final nail in the coffin for Western civilization. I don’t have any proof of this, other than cultural. Nuke fondlers tend to be culturally and politically conservative, generally with engineering or science degrees, and seem to pine for the idealized 50s so present in tradwife media nowadays (although nuke love precedes that by decades).

Opposition to nuclear power was sort of a death knell for the ideal of the technocrat.

Now of course nuke enthusiasts tend to be libertarians too, and they run smack into the fact that nuclear is really capital-intensive and expensive to insure. Thus the pipe dream of the inherently safe “container reactor”.

Sweden’s current gov is driven a lot by opposition to all things Green (both the party and the ideas) and pushed for the construction of 10 new reactors. It turns out that the industry has been burned by vacillating govs before and required hard financial guarantees, as well as a iron-clad price floor for electricity, to commit. So the pitch to the public would be: there’s no way you can lower your per-unit power cost for 30 years, and in return you get 10 items widely perceived as ugly and dangerous.