Reactors that only took 5 years to build before ALARA are still safely running 80 years later. The 15-20 year build and certification time for new reactors is purely made up. The countries that are building our battery and solar pipeline (China, South Korea, Japan) are all building nuclear domestically at 1/3 of the cost of us.
More importantly, for cobalt and lithium - we still exclusively rely on natural raw resources that are still very cheap. Meanwhile we have established reserves of fissile material for thousands of years.
Maybe it won't be in the near future, or even in our lifetime, but there is no way the human race does not turn to nuclear eventually.
We already use nuclear, if you mean fission as a primary energy source…
Batteries don’t consume lithium, battery recycling doesn’t consume lithium, we a literally use the same lithium for hundreds of billions of years. So the only way humans are going to be forced to use nuclear is when the stars die.
I don’t think humans will last that long, but if they do I’m unsure what technology they’ll be using. Theoretically dumping matter into black holes beats nuclear, but who knows.