It was a mistake not to go nuclear to get rid of fossil fuel plants 20 years ago. The window for new installations is closing rapidly as renewables improve however.
That said, in an effort to become more self sufficient I too will be installing solar panels in the near future.
Nuclear definitely has a long lead time (and requires huge initial capital), but it should be built nevertheless, as it is much more efficient than the alternative for base load production. It has also very good synergies with hydrogen production.
In [0], they give a figure of 5-6 years for actual construction. Add in a year or 2 for regulatory and other delays, and we're looking at 2027-2029-ish before we see a single megawatt of electricity out of them. What's more, there is probably only enough uranium to last about 5 years, if we could wave a magic wand and replace all existing power plants with nuclear [1]. Moreover, the plants themselves also have a finite lifetime of 40-60 years [ibid].
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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...
https://phys.org/news/2011-05-nuclear-power-world-energy.htm...
What if every time a country decided to build a new fossil fueled power plants, a rule went in to build a new nuclear power plant instead. In terms of climate goals, at worst we prevent the construction of new fossil fueled power plants. At best we arrive in the future with fossil fueled power plants replaced by an alternative that isn't cooking the planet.
Planning and constructing a new nuclear reactor takes at least 15 years and it's the most expensive and also dangerous form of energy source.
Just look at Hinkley Point C in the UK where costs exploded and construction was delayed over and over. The cost of £92/MWh (estimated in 2012) is outrageously expensive as well when wind and solar are approaching half. New nuclear reactors make no sense now.
Solar and wind don't generate waste?
And while batteries are getting better, they're still not to the point that solar and wind can just replace the kind of power nuclear produces.
Further, lithium batteries don't produce waste?
Per energy generated, it's not clear at all to me that the nuclear waste from a country running off nuclear power is worse than the CO2 emissions of running that same country off fossil fuels.
That cave full of nuclear waste has something like "all the waste generated by the UK to date". Enough CO2 to fill a cave is one coal plant running for a few days.
You should compare it to solar/wind/(etc) which produce neither CO2, nor radioactive plutonium, cesium, xenon, (etc)
It's really not. It is compact, contained, and isolated. It takes a tiny amount of space compared to any other solution.
> It's dangerous for tens of thousands of years
Some of it is. Most of it isn't. By definition, long-lasting isotopes are the least dangerous.
> we don't know if we will be able to tell a civilization 10,000 years in the future that the stuff we buried deep in a cave is dangerous.
We won't have a civilisation in the next century if we keep fucking it up. It is patently absurd, considering the state of the world, to keep saying that nuclear is the absolute worst. Non-nuclear is what put us in this very situation in the first place.
This is false. Even accounting the few catastrophic failures (including Chernobyl and Fukushima), deaths by nuclear industry can be counted in dozens.
Here is what says Wikipedia about the Fukushima aftermath :
> There were no deaths from radiation exposure in the immediate aftermath of the incident, though there were a number of (non-radiation related) deaths during the evacuation of the nearby population. As of September 2018, one cancer fatality was the subject of a financial settlement, to the family of a former station workman.
There were a few more deaths in Chernobyl but it’s mainly due to the bad management of the cleaning process.
How do you figure THAT external cost?
It is kind of interesting that almost no one have heard of it, and that it did not make major international news.
Put in a plan to stop building new coal and gas power plants in EU and that strategy would have a bit more support behind it. New coal, gas and oil is the core of the energy strategy for handling grid stability. It will last much longer than 15 years.