As long as we're playing counterfactuals: We should have used the untold zillions of public money and subsidies nuclear R&D got (both military and civilian sides) over the last 80 years on renewables, we would have reached the current level of advancement 30 years ago.

We can't build nuclear plants quickly. In the ten years it takes to build a nuclear plant you can build a lot of wind and solar. It's cheaper too.

The UK commissioned Calder Hall in 1953 and connected it to the grid in 1956 (although energy production was its secondary purpose).

We could do it faster if we really wanted to.

And if all goes as planned it'll only cost £121bn and take a total of 139 years to decommission. Really. Started in 1981, scheduled to finish in 2120, and nothing really went wrong

Oh except for the year after 1956, where that site saw the worst nuclear accident in the UK's history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

>Sir John Cockcroft, leading the project team, was sufficiently alarmed to order the filters. They could not be installed at the base as construction of the chimneys had already begun, and were constructed on the ground then winched into position at the top once the chimney's concrete had set.[42] They became known as "Cockcroft's Folly" as many regarded the delay they caused and their great expense to be a needless waste. During the fire the filters trapped about 95% of the radioactive dust and arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. Terence Price said "the word folly did not seem appropriate after the accident".

You've got to love the British understatement! Having said that, this was really at the start of the nuclear age and came about through the UK being excluded from US nuclear projects despite having contributed to the Manhattan Project under the incorrect assumption technology would be shared after the war. Windscale was built because Britain needed the atomic bomb to prevent its post-war decline making it geopolitically irrelevant and needed it before the US and Soviet Union banned further testing. There's no way anything like that would be built today by any sane government knowing what we do now.