You can't undo what's already been done, but if you want to stop damaging it further, or if you don't want to see our civilization collapsing/being seriously disturbed by running out of fossil fuel and therefore you want to go all green before that happens, then yes, you can build enough nuclear plants and absolutely positively have to.
This book [0] goes through math of pretty much all energy sources and one of the conclusions the author reaches is that if you want to cover all of our power needs with green energy, renewables alone ain't gonna cut it.
Why not? It would be extremely easy. The only reason they don't make more nuclear power plants is they are slightly more expensive on a KWh level than natural gas.
"In 2009, Petteri Tiippana, the director of STUK's nuclear power plant division, told the BBC that it was difficult to deliver nuclear power plant projects on schedule because builders were not used to working to the exacting standards required on nuclear construction sites, since so few new reactors had been built in recent years."
We're certainly not helping ourselves by delaying/canceling more nuclear projects because of stupidly high amounts of FUD in the society regarding nuclear powers.
The second one in France is not doing much better. Work in China on similar ones is faster. But it is unclear what's actually going on, due to a lack of transparency.
To be fair, using natural gas has an unknown future cost (global warming) which is not (properly and generally) reflected in either the cost of the gs fired power stations or the gas fuel itself.
Total agree, we should also be charging the coal/gas fired energy producers for the actual clean up costs, then it would be interesting to see which people want to invest in.
Only because fossil energy is currently cheaper. If it were more expensive, you would see all kinds of construction starting to use electric-powered equipment that used non-fossil-fuel electricity.
> But isn't that non-fossil energy built with fossil energy?
Not if you use non-fossil electricity to power all the steps in the build process. I should have clarified that that's what I was envisioning.
> Fossil energy has a higher EROI than other sources, currently.
Actually, I don't think that's currently true for nuclear; the EROEI figures for nuclear that I've seen seem way off, even if breeder reactors are left out of the equation. I don't think a lot of people realize just how much energy there is in a kilogram of uranium, compared to a kilogram of fossil fuel.
I don't think so.