Environmentalists have pretty much zero impact on the ability of nuclear plants to be started and demonstrate feasibility.

In the US, Georgia and South Carolina started building with nary a peep. France started building again without any environmental objections.

Yet these builds are all catastrophic failures, to the point that any other financial backer is scared away from even touching nuclear. The decision makers are those with the dollars to invest, not the environmentalists.

"environmentalists" in california have succesfully prevented at least 6GW from coming online, and were directly responsible for plans that shutter california's last operating reactor. They lobbied PG&E with a study they paid for that, under the insane assumption that california's energy use would _decrease_ in the future, concluded renewables would be cheaper. Meanwhile CAISO issued increasingly urgent press releases warning of the catastrophic consequences to grid stability were diablo canyon to close. A disaster which was narrowly avoided a few weeks ago by newsom.

don't underestimate the negative influence of "environmentalists"

> They lobbied PG&E with a study they paid for that, under the insane assumption that california's energy use would _decrease_ in the future, concluded renewables would be cheaper

Usage in California has gone down, and renewables are cheaper, just look at the blog series in the original article. Calling these well-known and irrefutable facts "insane" does not bode well for the plethora of other questionable assertions in your comment. For the usage:

https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

energy austerity is incompatible with climate change mitigations. eg thermal industrial processes currently powered by fossil fuels need to be moved to grid power.

their proposal was to spend $2B to lose 2GW of carbon free baseline power

everything in my statement is true and based on documents in the public record

I have followed the documents carefully, doing a deep dive on Diablo Canyon around 2020, but I do not recognize your framing of the situation as anywhere close to accurate. I'm also not sure what you mean when you are referring to energy austerity in your comment, of what $2B you are talking about.

$2B is the cost to decommission diablo canyon. energy austerity is planning to use less energy when we know for a fact we're going to need more.

Environmentalists have not been, are not now, and will likely never be the decision makers for building nuclear power plants.