If we were to start that now, it would add only 1% generation capacity, and that's assuming that all projects finish within 13 years (unlikely) and that none of the construction projects are abandoned as unfinishable in any way that makes financial sense (which happened to 50% of the reactors started in the US in the 2000s).
There's an assumption that we can simply rebuild what we built in the past, but technology has changed quite a bit, construction costs have risen quite a bit, and the lessons we have learned from prior reactors means that we dont want to build the prior designs.
Nuclear is a technology without a solid track record, and which has failed in the US, and in France, and in Finland. In these latter examples, we can't blame regulations or public support. Personally, my hypothesis is that construction productivity has been so stagnant compared to manufacturing productivity growth, that nuclear no longer makes sense for advanced economies. Economies at earlier stages of development with lower labor productivity and therefore lower labor costs, may be able to build nuclear cost-effectively.
We might be about to discover that every power policy in Europe has failed, there are a lot of people hoping for a warm winter. I'd be very nervous if their fossil fuel, nuclear, renewable or gas policies were being adopted where I live. There is a serial problem in the west where people aren't taking energy security seriously. If we were, we'd have been building nuclear reactors 13 years ago and we'd be building them now for 13 years in the future.
For this comment, I also looked up the Texas thing [0] from last year to see if there was a solid consensus on what happened yet RE wind energy's contribution. I imagine there must be some Wikipedia edit wars happening over whether to show the 7th on this graph [1] because it makes it look like Wind was pretty useless at stopping people from freezing to death in winter.
The plan for Texas was never to rely on wind, and how could they, wind is not reliable!
The plan was to rely on natural gas and nuclear, which are supposed to be reliable, but which were not in Texas.
Therefore, more solar and storage is probably the best way for Texans to gain reliability. Texas had the same problem with frozen gas and nuclear plants a decade earlier, knew it was a problem, and refused to fix it.
Decentralization is the only way for people to protect themselves with grid mismanagement like that, which means home solar and storage.
And it comes down to, utilities didn't spring for the cold weather package on their turbines. Effectively deciding that during extreme cold snaps they would rely on natural gas power plants. Which were also brought down by the cold snap.
With enough energy almost anything can be done. The most extreme example I go to is solving adverse effects of climate change on crops: simply build giant greenhouses - you have the energy to power artificial sunlight, desalinate water, etc.
With that in mind, this isn't the sort of lead you could easily (or even reasonably) catch up to. The manner in which an energy superpower would operate would be completely alien to compared to what we know today. China will come to economically dominate the planet unless America (or some another country) catches a wake-up call.
I guess just like high speed rail, China will leave the US in the dust.