Particularly when the politician who oversaw it is now working for Rosneft:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/dec/13/russia.germany
If anything, I really hope this spurs Europe to build out widespread modular nuclear power plants across the continent.
However, I think the picture of how rosy a nuclear future could be was oversold, even in the last century. Construction performance in the 1970s was abysmal. Even the most successful deployment, in France, stopped short of its initial plans, and did not fully decarbonize the grid.
Starting new deployments of modular reactors means talking about new construction modes, modes that we have no idea at all if they will be effective or cost efficient. It's a huge gamble, that even if it pays off, won't start paying off until 10-30 years from now. Nuclear is not a technology that we can depend upon to save us now. Which is not to say that we shouldn't try, it's just that we need to have backup plans in case Nuclear can't be built.
I'm sure I read this argument at least 10 years ago...
Which is why people are talking about modular nuclear reactors now, rather than large GW reactors. The industry had rejected modular reactors in the past as inherently more expensive than large GW reactors, but the difficult of constructing GW scale reactors has led them to try something smaller.
Will modular reactors succeed? Who knows! We will see. But it is definitely a gamble.
And an oil pipeline use is to reduce costs of bringing oil from a particular area to market. It doesn't necessarily have benefits that translate to the entire market, unless the change is so big as to move the entire market. And I don't think Keystone was that big, but couldn't say.
Also oil is not generally used at all in our electrical grid. Far to inefficient, and far more useful as fuel for vehicles.
Further, VC Summer has delivered zero benefit to people, despite it costing the average utility bill an extra $20/month last I heard. Keystone has had several phases complete, so there has been oil delivered to markets.
Through the aspect I wanted to bring up is that an energy company spent tens of billions on just transporting fossil fuel from one point to an other. Since it is the customer that pays for it in the end, I suspect most would prefer that their money went somewhere which does not contribute to global warming. If I were a customer of TC Energy, I rather would have seen a failed nuclear plant than a failed pipeline for fossil fuels.
Your opening comment implied that nuclear power would be strictly cheaper because of the higher enthalpy. If all costs were equal, you would be correct. All costs are not equal.
This sort of bullshitting attitude is why nuclear gets a really bad name. It's supporters do not understand it well enough. And if recent history is any guide, neither do nuclear's practitioners.
We didn't build nuclear weapons because they were cheaper, we built them because we desire danger and more danger requires more enthalpy.
By that logic even civilian usage of high enthalpy carries the risk of danger.
And by what logic? I never mentioned civilian use of anything, just that nuclear is more efficient.