Nuclear should be considered part of clean energy standard, White House says

There is a bad stigma associated with nuclear energy that I just don’t understand - Nuclear less impact to the environment when compared to other energy sources. What is is the problem with nuclear? Is it the cost of maintaining these power plants ?

Highly publicized 80s accidents (Three Mile Island in 79, Chernobyl in 86) coupled with late-Cold War anti-nuclear weapons proliferation protesting resulted in environmentalists lumping everything nuclear together until it reached "No" criticality.

After that, the reaction has been self-sustaining.

It's easy to campaign to tear something down. It's hard to be the one who has to rebuild the replacement. We need people who focus on the latter before the former.

"Believe the science" seems to be the rationale for many other things we are told to do, so why not this?

Because NIMBYs

This argument is facile. We have a for profit energy sector that doesn't want to invest billions of dollars to see returns in over a decade when they can build wind turbines next month and start making money immediately. If you want nuclear power it needs to be a national investment (see France). No amount of NIMBY can stop coal plants. It seems silly to think that's the thing holding back nuclear adoption.