How does one manage to stop nuclear energy but not fossil fuel use? These are arguably the same sorts of groups, with probably a large overlap. How did they have such power in one area, but not in another? If there is lack of lobbyist or industry pressure pushing for it, then we have to wonder why? Nuclear isn't cost effective as a business is the likely answer, and under our current system that drives most of the decisions.

I think people freak out much more easily when imagining a Hiroshima or Chernobyl or Fukushima in their home towns than when trying to picture the slow but unrelenting worsening of climate conditions over time caused by fossil burning, even though the former is local and unlikely and the latter is global and certain.

One of the issues I've found is that people genuinely believe nuclear reactors run on the same tech as nuclear weapons, and think that if something goes wrong they will have a mushroom cloud.

I'm very happy for countries like France to have nuclear power but a little scared of less stable countries. While nuclear weapons require enrichment, dirty bombs or unmaintained power reactors are terrifying.

Has there ever been a dirty bomb anywhere?

Politically it's was infinitely easier to stop expansion of nuclear power than to stop using fossil fuels. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was issuing more than 12 permits to build new reactors on average every year prior to 1979 (the year Three Mile Island accident occured) guess how many were issued between 1979 and 2012? Zero...

And I'm not even sure the people in the anti-nuclear movements were really that concerned about CO2 emissions in the 70's or 80's. While currently renewables are much cheaper than nuclear that wasn't the case 30 or 40 years ago. Without the absurdly irrational reactions to TMI and Chernobyl a few years later, we would have been much better situated to considerably reduce CO2 emissions but sure blame the oil lobby (of course there are plenty other things to blame them for) ...

> How does one manage to stop nuclear energy but not fossil fuel use?

It's easier to target marketing against a few 'smoke stacks' than ten millions tail pipes. It's easier for people to get people to sign petitions against an 'industrial site' that is many kilometres away that most people will never see, compared to having people trash their own personal possession (their car).

A fair comparison would be coal vs. nuclear, not cars.

They don't. But it benefits *for profit* energy companies to blame the lack of nuclear power on the hippies than on their ROI calculations. They can literally make money on wind power after 6 months, or they can spend billions of dollars and a decade on a nuclear plant that may never get finished. But it's the environmentalists that's stopping this development.