Thinking about it more concretely, nuclear shows no credible signs of becoming smaller and cheaper, just a lot of handwaving and hopium about how it might, one day, maybe, perhaps.

Meanwhile we could have gone hard on renewables from the 60s onwards, and the tech actually has a solid objective record of becoming cheaper and more efficient.

One person's timidity is another person's realism.

Tech in itself is never a solution to political problems. And scarcity, etc, are fundamentally political problems.

The problem specifically is creating a political system that keeps narcissists and sociopaths far from power. All of the main isms suffer from this problem, and the consequences of failing to deal with it are consistently, predictably, catastrophically horrific.