Falcon, we're both pretty much on the same page, I suspect. We want to move to energy production that doesn't impact the environment any more than necessary. You seem to be under the impression I am advocating coal, but my position is just the opposite - I'd prefer to shut down all the coal plants in operation tomorrow, and stop mining the stuff yesterday. Even a hundreds-of-years supply is not really sustainable, just not running out before we die, and we need to stop burning it all up.
Our difference comes from the way we're measuring the environmental impacts of the various options. Environmental impact of energy production comes from the waste emissions - "smoke" from coal plants, small amounts of very nasty radioactive stuff from nuclear, not much in the way of emissions from hydro, wind, solar, etc. I think that's the measure you're primarily or exclusively paying attention to. However, the environmental impact also comes from the resources you take out of the environment and the space you need to use to generate. That's where nuclear becomes a very attractive option.
Global warming is having a noticeable effect on our planet already, with melting polar ice and higher average temperatures (that my friends in Europe have definitely started to notice). That's measurable and visible change as a result of something on the order of one degree Celsius of delta. So to combat that, we put up huge wind farms; what happens when we've converted enough of the kinetic energy of the planet's airmass to reduce the average wind speed 1 km/h? Or wave farms; where are we when the tides don't rise and fall to the same extent? (They're the only thing holding up the moon!!!1! Kidding.) Or when we're redirecting enough solar energy to electricity that we start losing vegetation? Earth is a massively complicated balance of forces, and we've already f**ked with one variable enough to notice detrimental effects. I'm not keen to go playing with some others. Nuclear, on the other hand, won't still the tides, it won't slow the winds, it doesn't soak up the sun's radiation, and it won't release the CO2 that we now know from experience warms the earth.
...the wind potential off the Mid Atlantic comes to 330 [gigawatts]
Look at that another way - that's 330GW (but really a lot more, since windmills aren't 100% efficient) of energy getting taken out of the global airmass every year and put into our air conditioners and refrigerators. Nuclear takes that 330GW (again, more in reality) out of a fairly small amount of uranium or thorium.
Nuclear power has the smallest spatial footprint per unit of energy produced, as well. The Univ. of Delaware study you linked to (see, I click! I read! Feel the love, Falcon.) plans to generate 330GW of power annually - from 166,720 turbines floating on top of fifty thousand square miles of ocean. That's a wind farm roughly one-fifth the area of Texas, Mr President. The four nuclear generators listed for California in the DOE page you linked to, on the other hand, take up a total of 834 acres (~1.3 square miles) and provided 16% of California's power supply in 2004 with their 4GW total capacity (though they were not run to capacity). 330/4 = 82.5, so we'd need about 107 square miles of nuclear plants (relatively inefficient ones built in the mid-1980's, anyway) to generate 330GW of electricity that way. You could do that ten times over inside the King Ranch down here; I'm not inclined to slice that up into fractions of Texas as a whole, but it's obviously much smaller a required area.
Going by the University of Delaware study's numbers and the numbers in the DOE page, we can also calculate an energy output density of 330GW/50000 sq. mi. ~= .007 GW per square mile for wind generation, and 4GW/1.3 sq. mi. ~= 3.08 GW per square mile. Wind's footprint is 440 times larger than nuclear's per unit of energy produced.
Also, just a side note - the nuclear plants listed on the DOE page you linked two are actually four reactors but two sites, two reactors per site, and therefore 2GW per site rather than 1GW per site, as you'd calculated. One site is significantly larger than the other (750 acres vs. 84 acres), so I suspect that we could probably get even denser nuclear power than these calculations indicate (oh yeah, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor being built in South Africa, so not theoretical, and there's more out there if you prefer a different design). But I'm lazy, so I just used the average.
We don't need more centralized power, we need more distributed power.
Spreading around fifty thousand square miles of wind generators doesn't reduce the area they take up, and it doesn't reduce the amount of energy they're taking out of the airmass. It does have two positive effects: this reduces power loss in electrical transmission, since you don't need to transmit more than a few thousand feet at most, and it makes the users of the electricity more aware of exactly how much electricity they use. Thinking about setting up that Beowulf cluster of old AMD K6's? Fine, but you better start setting aside space for another windmill. A hidden drawback to distribution would be the fact that you either need the individual windmill owners to learn how to maintain and operate a windmill safely, or you need to burn the gasoline to send power company techs to do that for the scattered windmills if they're company-owned. Nuclear plants, on the other hand, employ some highly specialized techs to run them and allow the rest of us to specialize in farming, Linux system administration, Constitutional law, or whatever else we do "for a living". Solar's a lot better suited to distributed power generation, since you're not dealing with moving parts.
Still, I'm not advocating nuclear exclusively. I'd say ideally, we should first reduce our energy usage - you don't have to create what you don't need, and it's something we can do immediately with no investment in infrastructure whatsoever, just by altering our behavior. I keep my house warm in the summers and cool in the winters, for example, and bicycle or walk where I can (or motorcycle - I don't currently own a car), and grow a few veggies here in downtown Austin, Texas - not that I'm Ed Begley, Jr or anything, but I do what I can on that front. Next, we should shutter the fossil fuel plants and replace them with nuclear power, in addition to solar on the tops of buildings and other places we can squeeze it without shading natural ground space. Transportation needs to go electric as well, so we can centralize our power generation and distribute our power storage capacity (plugged-in electric vehicles act as a massive battery backup if we build a smart grid) and quit burning dinosaurs.
