[fallingknife]

I think a lot of it is timing, bias towards the status quo, and how much immediate tangible benefit there is to the consumer. Take the example of electricity. It's quite easy to build a coal power plant and extremely difficult to build a nuclear power plant even though the former is much dirtier and more dangerous than the latter. The reason is that when coal power plants were invented, the alternative was no electricity. It would have been politically impossible to make it difficult to build them or shut down existing plants. People would have rioted. Politicians would have been voted out. There were power plant accidents, horrific pollution, tens of thousands of deaths from coal mining disasters, but nobody is going to go back to not having power, so this was just accepted and became the status quo.

Then when nuclear power is invented and plants are built, the alternative is coal, not going without power. So when there are nuclear accidents, the regulators can go nuts and shut down plants, and prevent new ones from being built. Consumers don't care that much about what the source of their electricity is, and coal is the status quo, so no politician loses their seat for going back to it.

If nuclear power had been invented first, it and all its problems would have just been accepted as the cost of having electricity instead, and it would be extremely difficult to build coal plants.