If we'd built the capacity then, we'd have a whole lot less carbon in the atmosphere today.
I don't necessarily agree with the Greens but I remember this perilous time very well. And it was the incumbent non-Green powers who created this situation.
Furthermore, this is not the only theme the Greens pressed on and I must admit our country is already much much better for it ( cleaner air, cleaner waters ).
How much? Of what?
Same for the classic "look at that ugly city, so bad for the environment!" Bay area types who forced suburban sprawl.
Many facilities (back then and now) where unsafe (e.g. Ukranie) and are still a threat (e.g. France)
Add to that the short sighted actions by everyone involved. (DROPPING barrels in an abandoned mine for final storage, just to find out it does not only totally leak, but advisors precisely warned about it beeing not a suitable location (germany))
For me that's enogh to loose trust in governments and companies beeing able to run such an operation. Fukushima beeing the final nail to this coffin for many.
Maybe when we can proof the reliability, safety and waste efficiency of modern reactor systems, we can rebuild this trust. But either way, we are surely talking 20-60 years. It's scorched earth.
And this is a massive political issue with which the Green parties collect millions of votes. Meanwhile "of 265 US power plants that monitor groundwater, 242 report unsafe levels of at least one pollutant derived from coal ash" - so instead of the small potential of ground water contamination from a small number of nuclear plant waste barrels, people passively chose the almost certainty of ground water contamination by leachate containing arsenic, barium, beryllium, boron, cadmium, nickel, lead, mercury, molybdenum, selenium and thallium - a chunk of it radioactive.
But it got votes.
The design, deployment, regulatory/political hurdles, and the long operational lifetime of nuclear power plants, make that any improvements take a loooonng time to bear fruit.
Inertia of the installed base with its problems (and history), makes new development near-impossible.
That situation propably won't improve until newer designs accumulate a multi-decade track record of safety, or fusion power gets commercialized.
