Today, in the US, the *best* possible case is that a Nuke plant takes 15 years from the beginning of construction till power is actually generated, and it can take 20. That includes permitting and the host of regulatory roadblocks. As JMH pointed out, unless you are in favor of abolishing the EPA and the associated regulatory structures, this cannot change. Even if there is a political backlash, the EPA is not about to be abolished.

What this means in practical terms: Nuclear Energy is already out of the picture as a means to fix our problem, since we’ve already waited too long. Even if we started a wave of construction *today*, there would be no resultant energy produced before 2025. And our crisis hits *FAR* sooner than that.

Btw, have the “green energy” proponents noticed the humiliating collapse of the much vaunted geothermal project in California? Site suddenly abandoned, all federal money pumped into it lost forever. Not clear yet whether the proposed Oregon test project will suffer the same fate, but it’s the same company and it seems a likely outcome. Seems they actually *didn’t* do the science before they started spending the money. (Question: Did they really believe Al Gore when he said the center of the Earth was “millions of degrees”?)

Another factoid that the the green energy proponents gloss over – the large wind farms built in Texas over the last 6 years only have enough wind to provide power 30% of the time, below projections. The rest of the time their contribution to the grid comes from natural gas backup generators.

So, in real life terms, wind power = 30% wind, 70% nat gas. Heck of a a deal!

No other technology is even close to being able to generate power on the scale that is required. We are out of options.