I heard a theory that the real reason is because developing nuclear energy is one step away from building nuclear weapons. So they want to keep nuclear energy away from some countries so they don’t get to close to developing nuclear weapons. But I don’t know how true this is because I don’t know anything about nuclear so.
Discussion
I think it was Peter Thiel but don’t remember which podcast.
They didn’t choose a much safer version of nuclear (thorium) back when they first started building them. They instead went the tech tree route that also unlocked nuclear weapons.
We also expect costs to go down as a technology matures, yet over the first 30ish years the costs of generating a watt of nuclear energy went up two and a half times in constant dollars. A cynic might wonder whether other energy industries may have lobbied for onerous regulations in order to limit the impact of this cheap new source.