Wind turbines can be offshore. You can buy a wind turbine "off the shelf" and have people without nuclear training plonk it down wherever you want it, approximately as soon as you can stump up the money and get planning approval.

The USA has been adding wind turbines at the rate of ~four a day every day for the last fourty years, for a total of some ~60,000. In that same time the USA has started 4 nuclear power plants[1], all in 2013, all unfinished/in progress. The UK has ~11,000 wind turbines. We have 1 nuclear plant started construction in the last 30 years (Hinkley C) and it is two years in, and over budget. UK has five more proposed nuclear plants, and of those two are shelved and one cancelled[3].

It's not proven that the UK or USA still has the ability to build working nuclear reactors, or the ability to organise and approve and fund them - look at this link [2] about the last few years of the UK government changing, making, and cancelling approval and funding plans. Or that the UK will be able to source and transport nuclear fuels and wastes after Brexit.

Even putting all that aside, and assuming the world can source enough nuclear fuels for a massive expansion of nuclear power, and assuming we can overcome concerns about terrorism, and about getting a large increase in skilled people to build and maintain them, we can build and install wind turbines today, but if we start building one new nuclear plant a week it will be approximately a Trillion dollars (Hinkley point C in the UK is expected to be £23Bn+, the UK would need ~50 to go entirely nuclear for several Trillion pounds, the USA would need many more) and a decade or two to get a large amount of power generation from them. In two decades, wind and solar could blanket the country if we wanted, solar price drops, lithium ion battery price drops and other storage systems could make significant progress for a fraction of that money.

I'm not against nuclear in principle, but the first UK production reactor in 1966 was £30 million which is about £0.5 Billion in today's money. In 2008 the government was estimating £2.5 billion per plant, the chairman of E.ON said it could be £5 billion per plant. By 2012 estimates were up to £7 billion. Hinkley Point C had an actual estimated construction cost of £20 billion. In 2013 Centrica withdrew citing higher than expected costs. By 2015 the UK government agreed to pay double-rate for electricity from Hinkley Point C as a subsidy of about £6 billion on top of the build costs. By 2016 the UK National Audit Office said that subsidy could end up being more like £30 billion all-in. In 2017 they revised that to £50 billion. In 2016 the construction cost exceeded the entire market cap. of EDF the French company supposed to be building it. By 2020 it's two years into construction and construction costs are up another £3 billion to ~£23bn and we're Brexiting. It's been described as the most expensive power station in the world. The UK government has banned the funding model used from being used on future power plants.

Realistically, are we going to be 5 years down the line from here, with costs increasing so much the project gets shelved unfinished, or EDF collapsing and unable to finish it? There has to be a non-zero chance of that happening.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_Ki...

[3]