Re: We are paying for our politicians vanity.
The reason Nuclear is off the table is less because of the need to "appear green" (whatever that means in your mind, considering that nuclear is widely considered to be part of "green" energy) but more to do with risks, costs and availability.
Risks and costs are a major issue, especially when considering that the public heavily subsidises the operating risks of the nuclear industry, as done in this German study which looked at the true costs of nuclear power:
https://www.versicherungsforen.at/portal/media/forschung/studienundumfragen/versicherungsprmiefrkkw/20111006_NPP_Insurance_Study_Versicherungsforen.pdf
The reality is that nuclear power would be untenable if the operators weren't allowed to push the operating risks onto the public, as otherwise the annual insurance premiums for a power plant alone would end up costing Billions of EUR - every year!
Aside from the risks, there's also the time factor. It takes approx 30 years from laying the first brick for a nuclear plant to actually start producing power, That's a lot of time in which things can (and do) change, investors may bail out (as it happened on nuclear projects all the time), and technology moves on so once the plant produces power it's already yesteryear's technology. Where technology is today, any nuclear plant project that is started now will most likely not be economical to operate (i.e., not be competitive) in 30 years from now.
That might well be different with new reactor types (such as cold fusion, if it ever works, that is) but that's not the technology available today.
So holding off building new nuclear plants isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
