Not building new nuclear power plants in the last 30 years was a major mistake, in terms of energy supply security as well as CO2 emissions.
They are also enormously expensive to construct and don't scale down. You can build a single wind turbine for what, $100K? Even a basic nuclear power plant is now around $50B, which is a large chunk of change to take away from taxpayers leaving even less money to research more renewable/sustainable alternatives. I do think that a better policy decision over the past 30 years would be to be more strict on building reg…
A modern wind turbine will typically feature a 20 years lifetime and cost a few million dollars to produce a handful of MWs.
On the other hand, we see nuclear power plants happily going over 50 years of service while producing power in the magnitude of a few GWs -- and they do not cost $50B to build, but somewhere in the ballpark of a few $B.
Taking the very very rough estimate of twice 1000 wind turbines vs. one nuclear power plant to produce a few GWs over half a century, we arrive at $2B for the wind turbines vs. e.g. $5B for the nuclear plants. Of course, this does not take into account the fact that the wind turbines must be supported by another power source for when there is no wind, that maintaining a nuclear plant is much more expensive than maintaining wind turbines, that 1000 WT require manifold more ground space than a NPP, etc.; but we are still very far away from $100K vs. $50B. And that is also without taking into account the commonly cited load factors of 0.25-0.4 for WTs vs. 0.85-0.95 for NPPs, which would require building at least twice as many WTs in locations complementary w.r.t. exposition to winds to be palliated.
Windmills can be very nifty ancillary power sources, but they do not hold a candle to NPPs in the context of a(n) (inter)national power grid.
.png){kind=link}