Games like SimCity just embody the assumptions that are designed into them, and there's no reason to think the designer was any more prescient than anyone else.

After all, if they could predict the future, why did they design a game rather than get rich in the stock market?

Nuclear /could/ have solved this years ago but the spectacular and scary nature of failures like TMI or Chernobyl [0] really sunk any chance of that happening. Plus you had all the traditional nonrenewable energy providers intensely interested in stoking fears of that and the question of nuclear fuel storage.

[0] Yes pollution from normal everyday fossil fuel power generation causes more damage and deaths in the aggregate but it's a diffuse hard to attribute kind of damage which makes it far less, for lack of a better way to say it, real to people. eg: Did living downwind of that unupgraded coal plant really kill them or is their death because of something else.

Do you remember the microwave antenna power stations that power from solar satellites? The Moore-like drop of solar prices killed solar satellites, solar greenhouses with turbine chimneys, TW superconductor submarine cables circling the world etc.

Solar only works if you 1) live in a standalone house that 2) don't get tornadoes, typhoons, severe rainstorms or other disasters annually, and 3) they are installed on-prem, for off-grid capacities.

Games like SimCity often only supports ultradense Manhattan style cities and centralized solar plants through distribution networks. That combination doesn't work with solar technology. It should be like "Set up offgrid solar incentives program($1.5B)" buttons that reduces power draw proportionate to numbers of standalone houses that resets when disaster hits the parts of the map it was used on.

Funny that you mention SimCity ... I used to play it (mostly the Nintendo SuperNES/SuperFamicom versions) and nuclear power plants would invariably explode at some point. I guess few people talked about climate change back then because the only drawback to the other power plant types was space usage ... reflecting on it, interesting how the assumptions formed the game ...

Well, it is where all energy on Earth originated/originates from :)

Another huge reason, I bet is that it's possible for me to have my own solar system, but not really possible to have my own little reactor.

Solar is fusion. It is optically coupled to a free resource that was on the map from the beginning of the first turn.

It needs mines, but those are easily forgotten about once the blood money is washed through a few hands.

Nuclear's problem, despite it's Champions assertion that it's now safe and properly engineered, is it's still inherently dirty and that dirt follows it through out it's life. It also probably has bloody mines, but every step on the path of using nuclear requires security and safety, and even when it's disposed, it still requires safety and security. It loses because no one trusts anyone along the entire value chain to not cut corners that leads to unsafe practices.