Andrew it sounds like you only met mostly folk you wanted to meet, who were pro nuclear, so you can hand on heart say to yourself you believe the Aussies really want nuclear, and this all fits with your personal career ambitions.
I would put money on your average Aussie not supporting nuclear at all, they are also a country like all developed countries in process of switching onto solar, despite much of big business and the utilities industry that supplies it with energy being very opposed to solar, generating a crazy amount of misinformation about it, still folk are choosing solar over all other things, because we are most of us instinctively starting to realise that taking energy from the Earth is not such a good idea because it is fundamentally unsustainable, and we are running up against the practical fundamental limits right now, with the effects manifesting in the economy in a way that most people are struggling, or soon to be struggling to make a living, no matter what "Jobs" they are in.
I am guessing you are maybe a millennial. If you had been a boomer with your ambitions, you would have gone though life without touching the sides to become a very well heeled ex nuclear employee, now retired on a very tidy pension, living somewhere nice with family in your own substantial property.
That era is gone now, well heeled boomer retirees and their similarly retired parents never realised or accepted that everything they got was at the expense of many others outside their physical social bubbles that always existed before we had things like the internet, to show us with brutal clarity, the effects of colonialism on those who weren't lucky enough to be on the receiving side of it.
A question I recommend you ask yourself is did you spend your own money to take a short holiday to Australia, or were you there on expenses that might be later claimable as for business?
If the latter, then you can't claim you went there with an open mind, you actually went there with an agenda that you are now writing in Medium to try to justify, to yourself more than anyone else.
I feel for folk who are of an age who just missed the boat, of an ideal career life ending in idyllic retirement, seemingly rewarded for doing all the "right" things "by the book" starting out with excellent academic results, following the same model as their immediate parents and their generation. They did everything they were supposed to do, but life is snatching away the final prize of comfortable financial security, just as they are reaching for it.
I have younger relatives in this position and my heart rends for them.
I also have a daughter who is just entering "The system".
Kids her age, around the age of Greta Thunberg, have long lost any hope of achieving financial security by any standard career.
For the vast majority of them, they have more chance of winning the lottery, and look at the global environmental problems they are facing.
This is the reason I write in Medium. I've arguably sacrificed my own comfortable retirement, to use some of the skills and experience gathered in my professional career to date, to self-analyse this unsustainable system that folk of my generation and older created for ourselves.
My reward, if there ever is any, will be to benefit from the same benefits that will be had by all, from switching to 100% solar power.
That is assured financial security for all, in a world where all possibilities have opened up for all people of all ages and all locations, all skin tones, all religions, all creatures, all nature, our planet.
We've always known instinctively this is attainable, it is what always drove us until only recently, it seems to me.
The path we are on is at a cross-roads, a fork, splitting two ways.
One way leads to darkness, negativity, relentless scarcity enforced by an ever decreasing minority, in a majority which itself is successively culled by recurring environmental disaster, disease, wars, slavery.
That is the world we are heading for, with continued use of mathematically negative energy.
It doesn't go very far, maybe ten years max.
None of the big nuclear projects remaining will even get to completion, due to economic inflation which is being driven physically by nature for the first time in history.
Economists do not know how to deal with that because physics is outside their domain, they don't know how to analyse the economic system as an engine.
And an engine it is, one that has never really been switched on.
The other path leads to us switching this engine on, instantly enjoying all the benefits mentioned earlier.
True financial security and unlimited opportunity for all people.
After this is done, we will remember nuclear as something superseded, no longer needed.
I would suggest to you, if you wish to be able to see this better, you could read my story about how to fill the 50Bn black hole in the UK economy with light, noting that the entire analysis is numerical, based on actual utilities data in UK. It shows that the debt being claimed from the UK public, at a time when General strike is already looming in UK, by the majority of people in all manner of work, beginning struggle to make ends meet financially, is not a debt at all, but actually a credit, which makes perfect sense from the point of view of those people struggling to make ends meet.
They feel ripped off because they've put the work in, but rather than being rewarded for that work, they are being penalised for it.
Nuclear doesn't fix any of that.
But solar fixes all of it.