The head of the Australian energy market operator AEMO, Daniel Westerman, has rejected nuclear power as a way to replace Australia’s ageing coal-fired power stations, arguing that it is too slow and too expensive. In addition, baseload power sources are not competitive in a grid dominated by wind and solar energy anyway.
Even if we started to build nuclear plants like crazy right now, it would be decades for them to make a real impact. Building a single nuclear plant is very expensive and time consuming. Building up the necessary supply chain to build a lot of them would take much longer. In the meantime, you can build huge amounts of renewables in just a few years for a fraction of the cost, even if you factor in storage.