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Nuclear energy involves radiation and shielding can be damaged or just leak over time. With how poorly people maintain their cars and homes, it's likely that they wouldn't maintain portable energy very well not to mention car accidents.
Plus it gives every person access to bombs of some level. It's hard to make portable energy that can't explode. Even modern batteries or gasoline explode, just on a smaller scale so the damage is limited. If it's an amount of energy that would power a car for years, that would be a lot more energy to release as a bomb. There's no way to 100% prevent someone from turning any amount of energy into a bomb. Only ways to limit the impact. We have technology to make cars run on a more energy dense version of gasoline, but it would be potentially more volatile. Every major car accident where a vehicle exploded, could have created a fireball that took out the houses along the road as well as all of the vehicles involved. It's all about scale.
And that's ignoring the financial and political interests. The oil industry has kept battery technology from improving for decades by buying it up and shelving it. It took ages for modern lithium ion battery tech to reach its current state, but it's based on technology originally developed in the 70s and bought up by Exxon who showed it off and then only slowly developed it and only used it for very specialized purposes. In late-stage, post-consolidation capitalism, any basic technology that threatens an industry is bought, patented, sat on, updated a little when the patent is up, repatented and sat on, etc. And lots of money funneled to politicians to over regulate it. So, it takes generations to move technology forward if an existing industry feels threatened. Happened with cars threatening horses and buggies, now it's batteries threatening oil. It requires a very rich person who doesn't bow down to the legacy industry in order to break that cycle. Ford did it with cars and oil, it looked like Musk was with electric cars and trains, but he gave in to the legacies for power in the end. Ford got power through his fascism alone and used it to further his business goals. Musk seems to have given up on business and is concentrating on information war for fascism instead.