I think you exaggerate the dangers of nuclear compared to the alternatives. How many people in the US have been killed by nuclear power? How many by hydroelectric dams?
Terrorists are certainly an issue. The nuclear plant near me is well protected, but then it’s the largest in the nation and where “green” California gets 1.2 GW of reliable electric power.
High level nuclear waste is hardened specifically against terrorism, in the way it is encased, and transported. Off premises, it is guarded like nuclear weapons.
As for your comment on California wind and solar. I find solar to be less objectionable from an aesthetic viewpoint. But drive from LA to Blythe and see the giant mess of wind farms as you get near Palm Springs. UGLY, totally dominating the area. Drive from San Diego to Yuma — same thing, just smaller farm.
Drive from Tucumcari to Amarillo. If you do it at night, you’ll go many tens of miles with large numbers of blinking red lights to your left — on top of a huge forest of wind farms. Drive into a wind farm on the Red River in Texas near I-35, and see how it uses up all that land. And don’t forget the carbon released in creating the materials to build those monstrosities.
But my main problem with wind and solar is storage. You have not numericaly addressed the real problem with pumped hydro: where to you put the water? In California, environmentalists want to tear down one of the main large dams — they sure won’t let you build more. Those dams cannot add much pumped hydro capacity, because they were not designed for it, and they have other jobs to do. For pumped hydro, you need to pump between two reservoirs, so you have to have one downstream that usually does not exist, to hold the water you will pump back into the upstream reservoir when you want to store power.
You say it can be added to most any reservoir without much impact. How? How much energy will it hold, if you do that with every reservoir in California? What will it cost? What are the dangers — those dams are also regulated or run by governments which are far less competent than private companies, on average.
While CA only controls 3% of the forests, the air resources board is able to veto controlled burns on all of the federal forests in CA, plus environmentalists routinely file suits to stop any thinning or burning. I have read accounts by federal foresters unable to prevent fires because of both of these situations.
Also, even if PG&E did a much better job, there is always a danger of a power line sparking a forest fire. You can’t prevent them all. And… guess how you get the wind and solar power to the cities? Yeah, power lines — expensive, ugly, and potential fire starters.
No energy source is safe. Nuclear causes people to freak out because it sounds so scary, and also because the danger is concentrated in a few places. But nuclear’s record is outstanding. The number of people killed by nuclear power accidents, not counting Chernobyl for obvious good reasons, is almost zero. I’d bet more people are killed by rooftop solar in a year in the US than have been killed worldwide by nuclear power in its 60 year history.
