One compelling reason not to is the enormous cost. The second is the enormous difficulty. A third is waste products. A fourth is safety.
New reactors are phenomenally expensive. For example, the VC Summer project started to build 2 new reactors. The initial cost was nearly $10 billion. As costs escalated, the reactor manufacturer (Westinghouse) declared bankruptcy, estimated costs soared, and both reactors were canceled -- sticking ratepayers with the bills anyway.
And that was using a new design, the AP1000, which was supposed to be cheaper and safer than current designs.
In terms of waste, nuclear plants are near-zero carbon emissions (which is great) but still have an impact on the environment. Obviously, something has to be done with spent fuel rods, and so far that usually means dumping them in a hole, and who wants that in their backyard? Another issue is that they are almost always water-cooled, and all that heated water has to go somewhere. Enormous water consumption also means that areas experiencing droughts can't (or shouldn't) feasibly build nuclear reactors.
And of course, major accidents are rare but devastating, as we see from both Chernobyl and Fukushima.
As a result, it seems fairly clear that the safer, cleaner and cheaper options are:
• Energy conservation (an effective method that is criminally underutilized)
• Wind generation (whose costs have plummeted in recent years)
• Solar generation (costs down as well)
• Water turbines
• Hydrogen fuels
• Carbon capture (needs a lot of work though)
Seems pretty obvious we're better off developing cleaner, cheaper, more sustainable energy generation than nuclear.
