I think your comparison to nuclear power is very apt: it’s a panic that arises from real world examples of things going terribly wrong. I agree that we should have more nuclear power, and I agree that we should have more datacenters in Canada in general, if nothing else for data sovereignty. But the public resistance is justified, just as it was after the horrors of nuclear contamination became clear: these datacenters, especially AI-compute, are power hungry and don’t generate that many jobs, so it’s an even worse tradeoff than a regular automotive manufacturer coming to town. The public outcry is not useless: we should use it to push the datacenters to plug into our grid responsibly and priced accordingly, collect heat waste for other uses etc