The latest news about the Hinkley Point nuclear power plant in the United Kingdom should be the end of the nuclear debate.

The start date just got pushed back (again) to 2030. The bill has exploded from £18 billion in 2016 to £49 billion, with warnings that a further delay to 2031 adds another billion on top. That’s 15 years without a single electron.

Here's what £49 billion actually buys. At current UK prices, you could build 81 GW of solar, three times Britain's entire existing capacity, generating power within 1-2 years. Or 20 GW of offshore wind, more than doubling the UK's current fleet, at 30% cheaper than nuclear, delivering an average continuous output of 9 GW.

Hinkley Point C will produce 3.2 GW. For the same cost, you could have had three times as much being generated by wind, years ago.

This is the pattern of every major nuclear project in a rich country in the last 20 years. Vogtle in the United States: $14 billion became $35 billion, 15 years to complete. Flamanville in France: €3.3 billion became €13.2 billion, started in 2007, finished in 2024. Olkiluoto in Finland: 14 years late, costs tripled. Same story, every time.

"But wind doesn't always blow and sun doesn’t shine at night." Well, grid storage costs have dropped 90% in a decade. Battery storage is deploying at scale across the UK, US, China and Australia right now. The intermittency problem that might have justified nuclear ten years ago is a different engineering challenge in 2026, and cheaper technologies are solving it faster than anyone predicted.

The climate crisis is a speed problem, and nuclear construction timelines are 15 years. We don't have that long to wait.

Forget nuclear. Construct wind. Deploy solar. Build the batteries.