The primary problem has shifted in the last ten years from the political to the economic.
At this point, renewables are so much cheaper (and getting even cheaper, very quickly), and so much quicker to take from bare dirt to finished facility, that nuclear can't compete. Coal can't compete, either - it's now cheaper in some markets to build and run new solar or wind facilities than it is to just keep an
existing coal plant running, let alone build a new one.
And your comment that "the future of energy is decentralised and small-scale energy generation, along with renewables" is correct, IMO, but mis-states the relationship between "decentralised and small-scale" on the one hand and "renewables" on the other. Renewables are
intrinsically decentralised because they are intrinsically small-scale. Rooftop solar is the norm and enormous solar farms are the aberration. I could go even further: the easy, smart, cheap, sensible thing to do with solar is put a panel or ten wherever you need them, and only hook them up to the grid if it's convenient.
This is not theory, it's the emerging practice. You can visit a picnic shelter in a Cambodian hill village which is lit by a panel on the roof feeding a car battery on a shelf. You can see roadside safety warnings in outback Queensland - and in the state capital - powered by a panel on a pole and a battery in the foundations or a trailer. One rural property I know well has 4.5 KW on the roof of the homestead, connected to the grid; two panels on a bore pump a kilometre away (they were cheaper than replacing the power line from the homestead when it fell down); and half a dozen panels feeding lead-acid batteries in an off-grid weekender down by the creek.
This pattern of development reminds me of what happened with computing between the 1950s and the end of the century. Did you ever read the early SF stories in which one single, huge, computer ran the whole of the USA? Wrong, weren't they?
Kim