No one would have believed this possible only a few years ago, but nuclear energy has been creeping up in public estimation, despite its long record of unfulfilled promise and cataclysmic missteps.

The impetus has come from government and big business, among other sources.

Billions of dollars in incentives to keep existing nuclear plants operating and to get new nuclear technologies off the drawing board were enacted as part of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill signed late last year by President Joe Biden.

Byron Wein, vice chairman of the big institutional investor Blackstone, listed among his predictions for 2022 that “the nuclear alternative for power generation enters the arena ... and the viability of nuclear power is widely acknowledged.”

Some celebrity entrepreneurs have weighed in, without demonstrating that they have given the issue the thorough consideration it deserves. Elon Musk last month tweeted that “unless susceptible to extreme natural disasters, nuclear power plants should not be shut down.”

Musk didn’t, however, define “extreme natural disasters” or mention the myriad other reasons that a plant might need to be shuttered, such as advanced age, upside-down economics or dangers in its own design or operation.

The explicit rationale for the repositioning of nuclear power as a “green technology” is concern about global warming. Nuclear proponents argue that as a non-carbon source of energy, nuclear fission is an indispensable alternative to the burning of oil, gas and coal and a transitional technology, on the path to fully renewable resources such as the sun and wind.

Yet the enthusiasm overlooks some inescapable truths about nuclear power.

The history of nuclear power in America is one of rushed and slipshod engineering, unwarranted assurances of public safety, political influence and financial chicanery, inept and duplicitous regulators, and mismanagement on a grand scale.

Many of the problems originated in the government’s decision to place the technology in the hands of the utility industry, which was ill-equipped to handle anything so complicated.

This record accounts for the technology’s deplorable public reputation, which has made it almost impossible to build a new nuclear plant in the U.S. for decades. Forgetting the history threatens to stage the same drama over again.

The debate over the nuclear power future is really two separate debates.

First, there are the optimistic expectations raised by alternatives to the design of the 93 reactors currently in operation in the U.S. — reactors in which a radioactive core heats water, producing steam to drive electricity-generating turbines.

Then there’s the question of what to do with the existing reactors, many of which have lasted well beyond their design lives. Only 28 of these have remained “competitive” — that is, economically viable — according to energy expert Amory Lovins.

It’s possible that nuclear power will turn out to be as indispensable in fighting global warming as its promoters claim. It’s inaccurate to say the jury is out — it hasn’t even been seated yet. The danger is that claims for the future of nuclear energy — that it will be a cheap and efficient path to a carbon-free future — will be as illusory as those of the past, when nuclear power was also promoted as safe and “too cheap to meter.”

Today’s younger environmental activists may be more inclined to accept these promises today because their thinking wasn’t forged in the anti-nuclear protests of the 1960s and 1970s, as was that of their older colleagues. The danger is that they, and society, may have to learn the harsh lessons of nuclear power’s past all over again.

Michael Hiltzik is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.