I can see your point.
But unlike France, we have lost thirty years of progress in this technology, and when you go down the list of names that are the reason why, they seem to have an awful lot in common.
It obviously isn't as simple a label as "liberalism" or "leftism." It's not like France is exactly Galt's Gulch, and communist countries have been enthusiastically building reactors for years.
It's an anti-tech, anti-industrial psychosis that has absorbed far too large a portion of the environmental movement and other cultural nodes, and this needs to be challenged by others in the same movements. This is happening (Stewart Brand, EFN, Patrick Moore), but there aren't enough of them, and they aren't getting the same kind of news coverage.