[dabber]

If you mean the public, I'd expect a lot of people, if it were presented right, considering how often the cost of energy comes up in political discussion

If you mean congress, I think the more important questions are - who would lobby for it? - who would lobby against it?

[robertlagrant]

GreenPeace has a lot of content on their website[0] with questionable anti-nuclear power content. They have been a force for decades for anti-nuclear content, when renewables were in a hilariously worse state than they are today.

[0] https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/nuclear-power

[pfdietz]

Greenpeace had the unmitigated gall to be correct. For this, some people can never forgive them.

Amory Lovins is another example of this phenomenon.

[Turing_Machine]

Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore not only admits that he was wrong about nuclear power, he is now actively pro-nuclear.

https://www.politico.com/story/2008/03/why-a-greenpeace-co-f...

[pfdietz]

That's a story from 2008. The case for nuclear had not so completely fallen apart at that point. But since then PV has become an order of magnitude less expensive, and the "nuclear renaissance" has so spectacularly flamed out in the US.

Moore's claim that replacement of fossil fuels would require nuclear is at this point objectively wrong. I mean, it was unproven then and disproven now.

[robertlagrant]

It would be good to hear some evidence of why you think it's disproven.

And the topic of this thread is what lobbying has prevented said nuclear renaissance. You can't use the result of lobbying to prove that the assumptions behind the lobbying were correct.

[pfdietz]

Renewables and storage are cheap enough that a 100% renewably powered world economy is possible. And they would be cheaper than nuclear in most places.

The objections to this now are mostly "but it hasn't been done yet", which is the last ditch stand of the passive-aggressive denialist (and hypocrite, if that person says nuclear could do it.)

[robertlagrant]

They had no idea if they were correct, and if more nuclear power had been built then we would be in a much better place globally than we are in now.

Only France, being the archetype of the unmitigated Gaul, actually pushed ahead despite all this Greenpeace pressure and established a great example of lowering CO2 emissions without burning a load of gas. Which to me implies that they weren't correct.

And no one is forgiving them or not. I'm just stating another large force that has been a nuclear power trip hazard for the last 50 years and prevented the economies of scale for nuclear that all forms of power generation need to lower their costs. The question was "who would lobby against?" which I was answering.

[mc32]

Hard to say. The public is divided. Even environmentalists are divided. Some follow the old misinformed guard led by ms. Fonda and you have some more new throwback environmentalists behind nuclear.

It really sticks is my craw that a misinformed but activist actress can torpedo an industry for half a century.

[kwhitefoot]

The industry and governments of the time torpedoed itself by insisting on secrecy and, especially in the case of the UK, doing stupid things like building the reactors on SSSIs (sites of special scientific interest, for instance Torness) instead of building them near where the power was needed.

As someone else said in this discussion: presented properly many people would vote for nuclear power. However, you need to have some substance to the presentation too.