Canada

A fair number of Canadians were terrified by the gross incompetence that led to Fukushima and similar disasters from us entrusting such dangerous but useful technology to private entities.

Another portion likely have familial ties to the absolutely disastrous uranium mining that was done knowingly unsafely and relied primarily on first nations labor.

There's also always the portion that thinks anything nuclear is bad because of atom bombs.

I'm not certain what other people's objections are, but the first two points are extremely valid and we need to work to regain that trust. Personally, I used to live in Vermont and Vermont Yankee irresponsibly leaked tritium into the local water supply, essentially, because proper handling was too expensive... the corporation then proceeded to declare bankruptcy and pay out investors before placing the burden of clean up primarily on tax payers.

We need to do nuclear right, it should be entirely government run - no neoliberal bullshit involving private companies like AirCanada.

Personally, I have a fair amount of faith in the CANDU design. The fact that they can operate using unenriched uranium is itself comforting relative to light water designs, and they employ a number of passive safeguards that would have prevented a Fukushima or what have you.

That said, I think we as Canadians tend to forget that most of us live near the border and there are nuclear plants on the other side as well. For example, where I live, the nearest plant is on the other side of Lake Ontario in upstate NY, as opposed to Darlington or Pickering as you might expect. And it might as well be the sister plant of Fukushima in terms of its design.

At any rate, though, I am generally supportive of building more reactors if done right.

The other 45% can go push a giant dynamo like the mill in Conan.

Same old strawman arguments. If it was just a question of poor reputation or people's fears, we'd still be building reactors. PR can paper over those questions easily enough.

No, the issue was, and remains cost, more specifically massive cost overruns. Darlington was the last new plant built in Canada. It ran the equivalent of $24B in today's money, for 3500MWe. Not cheap. Especially in light of how cheap the alternatives are.

SNC (AECL) are out of the new build business, so we'd likely end up looking at Areva EPR (or if we really want to gamble, the EPR2) or Westinhouse AP-1000. Their track records are even worse. The Vogtle-3 & 4 AP-1000s were supposed to cost $12B, but will end up running over $30B by the time they're both up and running. The similar V.C.Summer units 2 & 3 project was supposed to run $9B, but the project was cancelled while under construction when projections had it running $23B at completion.

Areva's track record with the EPRs is as bad. Olkiluoto-3 started construction in 2005, was supposed to finish commissioning in 2010, but only completed it in 2022. Costs went from €3B to €11B, though were limited by the contract. Flamanville-3 started construction in 2007, was supposed to complete commissioning in 2012, but it now projected for 2024. Costs have bloated from €3.3B to in excess of €20B.
Hinkley Point C is 2xEPRs . Initial budget was £16b. Currently it's on track to hit near enough £30B.

The French government has had to bail out Areva, and is in the process of re-nationalizing Électricité de France because of the massive liabilities they've been accruing. The average age of a French reactor now is 38 years. The GenII plants had a design life of 30 years after which they have to undergo in depth inspections, repair deficiencies and apply for a 10 year license extension. It was during this process that they discovered cracking and erosion in process piping. Between that, low water levels, and concerns about high effluent temperatures on the low water levels, at one point in '22, 35 of 56 operational reactors were offline. The French don't have the capacity to replace the older reactors fast enough. Their industry is in a tough spot.

Nuclear fission based reactors should be left for beyond Earth's orbit; for space exploration, space mining, etc.

On earth, it's more of a liability with multiple security/safety concerns that engineers, architects, scientists and risk management specialists have to contend with, thus making any project exponentially and unnecessarily more expensive. Theorically, we all know and understand that following all the baseline protocols and maintenance schedules rigorously will keep a nuclear fission power plant working without environmental/health/safety issues for its entire entended life cycle.

However, we live in an imperfect world where important things gets postponed, rescheduled, ignored out of inconvenience, forgotten due to changing priorities or changes in personnel/chain of command, or mismanaged simply due to political interference/apathy/nepotism/ignorance. All this is internal to its regular operation.

Externally, we have to constantly/actively monitor and react to natural disasters, accidents, terrorism, climate change (e.g. input water temperature), etc. So as to ensure operational integrity at all time.

In contrast, nuclear fusion based reactors have the potential to solve alone all our energy needs for the foreseeable future in a carbon neutral (even carbon negative) manner. However, the resources assigned to make a scientific breakthrough in that field is largely insufficient if not scrawny/famished. It is indeed several magnitudes more expensive, supply chain constrained (special custom equipments and parts), rife with delays, constantly over budget all while still trying to understand the fundamental science with experiments and scientists spread throughout the four corners of the planet.

We could accelerate the progress towards nuclear fusion power plants similarly to how we accelerated COVID-19 vaccine research & production, but it will require several times more financing into each potential fusion reactors designs and each of their successive prototypes (tokamak, stellarator, spherical tokamak, inertial confinement, liquid metal mediated magnetized target fusion, magneto-inertial fusion, etc…)