Besides safety concerns, the biggest impediment to nuclear is simple economics. These are massive, capital intensive projects, with very long timelines. I wish I could dig it up easily but in the nuclear thread the other day an engineer posted an interesting retrospective analysis of what sort of engineering projects were likely to go massively over time and budget. Guess what was at the top of the list.
While nuclear proponents would like to place blame solely on what they consider excessive regulation or by demonizing environmental activists, the reality is that investment dried up for nuclear because the bean counters saw the ROI and timeline was bad compared to alternatives.
When you ask this same faction how to fix that they'll say small modular reactors, etc. That would be great if it existed. It doesn't. People have been trying to make it work for decades, NuScale the latest. I was bullish on NuScale when they started; it really looked like they'd cracked the code. Now they're floundering too.
I would be ecstatic if someone creates these great SMR's that are economic, but I'm not holding my breath.
There's no doubt nuclear needs to be part of the future energy mix, but the idea that all we have to do is get aggressive with nuclear and our problems are solved is navie nonsense imo.