Nukes are only uneconomical because coal power is cheap. And coal power is only cheap because its pollution can be dumped straight into the atmosphere and ignored.
Give me contained nuclear waste over dispersed atmospheric pollution any day. And as much as I personally like windmills, no-one seriously claims that renewables can supply all the energy the world needs. Not without cutting back energy use.
But no government is ever going to sacrifice economic competitiveness for energy efficiency.
Btw, there is way more than 20 years worth of uranium on this planet. 20 years is just the current known reserve that can be extracted at a price low enough to make a profit at today's prices. As the price goes up, more of the reserve becomes economic to extract, which ups the time scale to hundreds of years (maybe enough time to get fusion working even!). And uranium can be reprocessed and reused many times over.
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