alt Hacker NewsMost of the reactors we have in the US today are the result of building many of a few models per year during the late 1960's - early 1970's.
In 1974, 12 reactors entered commercial operation and 13 more were begun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_nuclear_rea...
The technology was given almost a century to prove itself cost-effective. It did not succeed in the market and only ever worked with truly massive amounts of government subsidies.
High fixed costs + more reactor sites -> more expensive, more nuclear waste sites for taxpayers to clean up
Each of those existing plants were competitive against coal at the time without having the negative externalities of widespread radiation exposure (uranium in coal just released to the atmosphere); mercury contamination in all our freshwater lakes and the ocean, leading to strict limits on consuming fish for children and pregnant women; and a half-century of CO2 emissions.
Orders of magnitude more people are killed by rooftop solar, but we haven't raised safety standards on all other sources of electricity to be the same level we require for nuclear.