What if nuclear power hadn’t been discovered? How important is nuclear power? Would existing supplies of coal, oil and gas been sufficient? If not, would natural sources - wind, sun, tidal, for example - have coped? Would we have found another way of providing power for lighting, heating and transport? Is there anything else that we wouldn’t have now if we hadn’t split the atom? I’m ignoring weapons here; I’m only interested in peaceful uses.
Ref Nuclear power - Wikipedia nuclear power provides about 15% of the world’s electricity. If that disappeared overnight we’d have problems. But if it had never been invented it would not have been difficult over the last 50 years for the utilities to have built another 15% worth of coal, gas, and hydro plants to make up the difference.
So as to domestic electricity, the lack of nukes would be immaterial.
There are some industrial and medical uses for radiation that would be hard to replace with alternate technologies if all knowledge of things nuclear had never occurred. So the lack there might be significant.
But that depends on exactly what parts of technology you’re positing we didn’t invent. e.g. Many medical radionuclides are manufactured in particle accelerators, not reactors, so he lack of reactor technology wouldn’t affect them.
The purely economic effects would have been trivial compared to the effects of nuclear weapons never having existed.
Do the nuclear propulsion plants in aircraft carriers and submarines count as “peaceful uses”? I suppose we could have conventional ballistic or cruise missiles, but the without the ability of the submarine to lurk undetected for months… and can you imagine the fleet of oilers you’d need to keep a carrier as mobile as a nuke ship?
Considering that the pursuit of the nuclear bomb has fueled science in a way few things have before or since, I have to disagree. There are a lot of things our nuclear laboratories have developed that may have been delayed for decades or centuries if our government wasn’t funding billions of dollars worth of research every year.