Historically, nuclear reactors have always been expensive and time-consuming - it's just a fact of life.
Building a facility like the one below, often the size of a small town, costs billions of dollars. It can also take up to 17 years, as was the case with Finland's Olkiluoto 3.
Therein lies the conflict between the fiscally conservative and the forward-thinking progressives.
Very few investors can hope to make money when the average project runs billions of dollars over budget and stretches years past the expected completion date.
Physicists can cry about the potential for limitless clean energy all they want. If the project loses enough money, you can bet it will be the last one.
The industry's solution to this problem has been practically nonexistent. Instead of engineering these problems away, reactor designers just continue making their projects bigger, more expensive, and more prone to delays.
And they wonder why the general public is so easily swayed against nuclear power...
That's not even mentioning the industry's safety record. Although it's statistically the safest way to generate power, the potential for disaster is hard to ignore.
Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl are isolated incidents, but the potential for world-altering disaster is admittedly unique to nuclear power. It's a tough fear to talk the average person out of.
The only solution here is to completely redesign nuclear energy. The next generation of reactors will be everything that old-school designs aren't: smaller, cheaper, and safer.