I would bet most of these protests were funded by the fossil fuel industry. The chances of this many people organically being anti-nuclear are near 0%.

It’s also funny how it was the environmental activists who were the ones who were powerful/influential enough to be “entirely responsible” for killing nuclear energy as opposed to be the poor old fossil fuel industry.

Guess which state earns a lot on Europe staying with fossil fuels but not much if we go all nuclear?

They were able to kill the nuclear energy industry because the economic cost of killing it was low. The alternative to cheap, reliable nuclear was cheap, reliable coal.

They're struggling to kill off the fossil fuel industry because the alternative to cheap, reliable coal/natural gas is expensive (when accounting for energy storage + backup energy production capacity), less reliable renewables.

Ironically, they'd have a much easier if the alternative to cheap, reliable coal/natural gas was cheap, reliable nuclear energy!

> Funny how environmental activists were powerful enough to kill the nuclear energy but not the fossil one.

It's a lot harder to affect something that's so firmly embedded in how we do things as a society. Blocking new nuclear developments was a lot easier than undoing generations worth of infrastructure around fossil power.

A comparison can be drawn to the USA's short-lived attempt at prohibition of alcohol versus the long-lasting prohibition of marijuana which is only now finally calling apart.

The one our society has been at least partially built around for generations has its problems normalized and mostly disregarded until something unignorable happens, which still often gets swept under the rug, where the alternative gets constant scrutiny and has to meet standards the established norm has never been held to.