Another other things nuclear power plants don't take 15-20 to build in sensible economies. You also cannot use wind & solar + batteries to replace nuclear power.
Pre-Fukushima, the Koreans were able to pop out a gigawatt every 5 years or so. Things dramatically slowed down afterwards, so even they are not immune to whatever it is that makes constructing nuclear powerplants slow as all hell around the world.
The Barakah plant in the UAE, built by the Koreans, took 9 years.
Cannot with our current level of technology. You are not going to provide the required level of power in Canada during the winter with wind or solar with todays battery technology.
I asked Claude:
"If combined wind+solar output drops to ~10% of nameplate during one of these (a standard threshold), a ~77 GW fleet sized to meet average winter demand produces ~7.7 GW against a ~22 GW cold-snap peak — a 14 GW shortfall that storage alone has to cover. That works out to roughly 340 GWh for a 1-day lull, ~1 TWh for 3 days, ~1.7 TWh for 5 days, ~2.4 TWh for a week, and ~3.4 TWh for 10 days. Ontario's entire current and under-construction battery fleet sits in the single-digit GWh range, so even a mild 3-day lull needs ~100-200x what's actually being built, and a serious week-plus event needs 400-600x — which is why lithium-ion batteries work fine for hourly duration but make no economic sense at the multi-day scale these lulls demand."
One of my pet peeves is that people keep quoting numbers about solar costs oblivious to location, time of year, etc. No wonder some people are sticking their fingers in their ears and saying "neener neener neener".
Battery storage for diurnal variation in favorable locations looks feasible, battery storage for annual variation looks absurd. Maybe you can overbuild solar by a 3x factor in some places, I've gotten cost numbers from 'a little less than what an AP1000 is claimed to cost' to 2x more with back of the envelope calculations that probably aren't worth anything. Then there's Dunkelflaute.
It would help if you could find a good use for the excess energy but the capital cost of anything you don't use all the time is multiplied.
My prediction is that in the not to distant future solar/wind + storage will be able to replace nuclear in most areas on Earth. The growth of solar has historically been underestimated [1], and it will continue to be underestimated. Even if nuclear gets cheaper, solar will get cheaper faster.
The development of storage has a long way to go. Outside batteries, there are other options, such as pumped storage. Even then, battery prices might go down enough to make other forms of storage uneconomic.
I also predict that a revolution is yet to happen in the transport of energy. For those areas that can't be self-sufficient in solar/wind, it may turn out to be cheaper to capture renewable energy elsewhere then transport it to where it needs to be used (we already do that with fossil fuels).
The Barakah plant in the UAE, built by the Koreans, took 9 years.