It’s mind boggling how a country can be so rich as to spend millions of manhours on a project and never use it. Maybe we have become too rich as a species.
Or we have become stupid enough to start projects that in the case of nuclear power plants are mostly over budget, over time and with the unsolved long-term problem of nuclear waste. Imagine all that money back then invested into solar research and building wind farms.
It wouldnt keep happening were it not for the military wanting to share a supply chain and skills base with a civilian nuclear power industry.
That's why some countries gain and then lose interest in nuclear power as well - e.g. Poland has recently and suddenly gained interest in it because of Russia.
As a rule of thumb, If something seemed too good to be true, but then never was adopted at scale; assume that it didn't worked as planned in the real life, and was silently discarded to save face. Lost of trust in a mega-project is a serious issue.
To start, the sellers of the project will be pressed to embellish the history and real capabilities of the system.
And mega-projects are a magneto for corruption. Part of the money will vanish, then somebody will typically hide it, cutting corners in safety, and then some horrified official looks at it and thinks: "No way I will sign the green light and associate my name with this mess".
This is a dilemma. Politicians can't never, ever admit that this never worked (and millions were burnt by their naivety). "best thing since chocolate with grapes, but can't be opened and will never be" is a common defense. Plus <blame deflected to outer group like hippies or public> for better measure.
I'm not saying that this is the case here, but it just happens a lot with mega projects and, lets face it, companies working on nuclear projects were all except honest or transparent with the public on those years
The cost of development at the time were around 5 billion Austrian Schillings. That's around 360 million EUR when the exchange rate was fixed in 1999, in today's money it would be about 560 million EUR (ca. 600 million US$). Last year that would have bought you 42 minutes of superbowl commercials, 4 minutes less of the total amount of available air time (46 minutes).
Emperor Nero invested millions of man-hours into the Corinth Canal, but that did at least eventually get some use a mere 1,800 years later.