Land Use:
Wind
Wind land use is nowhere near what people make it out to be. It used to be a problem with the older and smaller turbines that where first put up in California. The blades moved faster and so you had issues with throwing ice. They also had large truss support towers that look sort of like the Eiffel tower which take up a lot of space. (They have other draw backs which will be addressed later.) What's even worse is that they were set up basically shoulder to shoulder to the point where the blades almost overlapped and all facing into the prevailing wind. That and they are relatively short. The combination of these factors made them very inefficient uses of land. Not to mention the best wind potential is like 50 miles offshore anyway.

Modern wind turbines are giant and set on single poles with no support structure. They take maybe half an acre or so of land for the actual pole and a little more for the access road to get to it. Their size also means the blades spin much slower. Further they are designed in combination with this slower speed so that they only shed ice straight downward when a blade reaches the bottom. No more chucking dangerous pieces of ice. Not to mention the turbines are now hundreds of feet in the air. The net effect is that you can farm and graze animals all the way up to basically the pole of a modern wind turbine. When you add it all up Natural Gas plants use 3.7 acres of land per MW, Nuclear uses 2-3 acres per MW, and modern Wind power comes in at 3 acres per MW. So in reality there is no problem at all.

Solar
The main potential of solar power lies in intermediate size solar systems. We're talking putting solar panels mainly over parking lots. For comparison, with current solar technology if we covered 10% of the land that we have already paved (US only) in solar cells we could meet 100% of the nation's energy demand. This also translates to about 1/3 of the land currently used for military basis. Both figures count only used land area that is in the physically connect 48 states. This is land that has already been more or less destroyed in terms of Nature and can continue to be used by humans as we intended while also generating power. There is the added benefit to doing solar over parking lots in terms of Vehicle to Grid (V2G) technology when electric cars become more common. V2G technology is very promising in terms of smoothing out the power fluctuations that can sometimes happen with solar as well as improving the performance and reducing the operating cost of electric cars.

Note that there is still room for the efficiency of solar panels to double which would reduce the figure by half. Also note that no one wants to rely 100% on solar or wind. The current figures generally stated are around 20% from wind and around 30% from solar with the balance of the left over power made up for with other less mature renewable technologies (tidal, geothermal, biofuel, etc), efficiency, and conservation. There would probably still be some large solar plants put up in some places but nothing nearly as bad as what some people would have you believe. Additionally the areas will only shrink as the technology improves.

Bird Kill:
This is where those old support towers from the wind turbines come in. Birds tend to be rather good at avoiding moving objects and not so good at avoiding stationary ones. Generally speaking the turbine blades don't kill the birds. The problem with bird kills is basically exclusive to the California wind farms that were built with those Eiffel tower like support structures closely packed in a line. When a flock of birds try to fly through that some smack into the metal trusses and some are forced into the metal trusses by the birds next to them. This can be a big problem but has mostly been eliminated by several key changes:
1) Single pole construction greatly reduces the bird lethal bird strikes on the support structure.
2) Wind turbines are now huge and very very far apart. So far apart the squeezing effect isn't really an issue.
3) The wind potential in an area is now very accurately mapped and turbines are placed to optimize performance. They can also swivel 360 degrees and change the pitch of their blades to take full advantage of the wind to produce greater efficiency. Combined with larger size this means less turbines and giant wide open spaces between them.
4) Before anyone bothers to build a wind farm the check bird migration routes so as not to put them in the way in the first place.
5) The best wind is a good ways off the coast in basically any large body of water to begin with.

To really get a perspective on this you have to compare the number of bird kills via other human activities. Current wind farms kill about 2.6 birds per turbine per year and to get 20% of our current electricity demand we'd need 211,000 turbines which would kill about 550,000 birds a year. In contrast to that communications towers (cell, TV, radio etc) kill 4-5 million birds in a year. Pesticides and oil spills kill 67-76 million birds in a year. Vehicle collisions claim another 80 million birds every year. The buildings we live in work in are attributed with 78 million to 930 million total kills depending on various factors and who you ask. Finally, the number one undisputed champ is domestic house cats which kill about 450 million birds every year. So as you can see not only are wind farm bird kills a non-issue we could potentially cause a net decrease in the number of birds killed just by eliminating the need to ship and pipe oil.

Transportation:
Hydrogen fuel cells are just stupid plain and simple. You waste energy producing the hydrogen and storing it is nothing but a headache. Then when you get down to it hydrogen generally has lower power densities than batteries. Especially the newer batteries that are being made with nanotechnology. Batteries that are not only cheaper and safer than Lithium Ion but also so signs of ever increasing power densities, decreasing weights, and charge discharge rates that make capacitors look slow. Gas-electric hybrids only make sense sort term until we can get to true electric cars which aren't really that far away. We have all the technology more or less but not the will to use it probably. (Contrast this with Fusion where there are giant gaps in technology and even theoretical understanding.)

Fission
Fission is just not an option. For starters any energy solution as to be a global solution. The problem with fission is that once you have the ability to make fuel for a fission reactor you can make bomb grade material in the same facility and its basically impossible to tell which you are doing. This is even more so the case when you actually take steps to hide what you are doing. As such giving out fission technology isn't really a viable option. Incidentally, neither is building the fission plants and selling them the fuel. One of the by products is the production of Plutonium that can be used in a bomb. This can be separated from the spent fuel rods with simple chemical methods at sufficient purity to build a bomb. So even if we just gave away plants the countries that got them could still make bombs.

The other big issue is storage. We've got no where to put the waste and its going to be around for a long time and there is a lot of it. The shortest of the dangerous types has a half-life of 24,000 years, the next 213,000 years, after that 2.3 million years and then 15.7 million years. These numbers are worse than they seem because it can take many many half-lives before this stuff decays to non-lethal let alone non-damaging levels. As a sense of scale recorded history doesn't even stretch back 24,000 years. Then on top of all this there are the risks of accidents and attacks and it just really stops making sense as a method of energy production.

Fusion:
Fusion really does hold great promise. Problem is that it has been 20-50 years away now for about that long. Its not entirely a problem of funding either. Who knew that harnessing the power of a star and holding it in a metal tube would be so complex? It is immensely complex to the point that every time one problem is solved it produces several more. There are innovative solutions out there that could work in much shorter time scales but its akin to gambling. Why risk that fusion may not work in time, or ever, when we have proven technologies right now that can do the job for us more quickly and much cheaper. Once we get moved to renewable sources I'm all for pouring on the gas towards fusion. We just really need to get out of our current predicament first.

That in a very large nutshell is where we should be heading in the long run in terms of energy.

If that stuff about solar power is true, then why the hell haven't we done it?

Money, politics, NIMBYism, denial; take your pick.

Because fossil fuels are still cheaper in terms of the plants already existing for the most part and the fuel itself being easy to get. Generally speaking the energy sources that make up most of our supply cost about 3 to maybe 4 cents per kWh to produce and then get sold for 3 or 4 times that. Wind is at about 4 to 6 cents per kWh now which is why so many wind farms are starting to go up. Currently solar costs about 20 cents per kWh and most of that cost comes from converting the DC power of the panels into AC power that you can use. A small not even single home sized inverter (the power converting thing) can cost almost $2,000. You can overcome this by building parking lot sized and up solar power systems as well as getting better at mass producing the panels and the inverters themselves. The Department of Energy and the Utility industry as a whole expects that by 2020 solar power will be down to about 6-7 cents per kWh. In short, its purely about economics and not being motivated to make the change.

There is of course the massive misconceptions out there that have already come up in this thread. The continued propagation of which can at least in part be traced to propaganda and lobbing.

Only barrier I could see would be funding and working out who owns all the property.

Edit: Beaten to it with much better arguments

Thank you for clearing up my misconceptions actually. I'd rather be told I'm wrong about something, kinda helps in that there learning process.

I'll admit I was only thinking locally with Fission I mean, in terms of the large energy consumers worldwide: the US, China, India, Europe; already have the know-how to make reactors and bombs, and having us/them cut fossil fuel usage by building said reactors would have great impact until means to help the other nations with their energy problems arises.

As to the waste storage: How much waste does a reactor produce during its lifetime (what is that, 50yrs or so?) and how much of the world's nuclear waste is actually from other sources (weapons production, medical usage, etc.)? Sorry for pestering you with questions Sithdarth, but you seem to have the info and have done a pretty good job stating things in ways I can understand :D

Even locally it doesn't make sense. Nuclear power plants are horribly complex systems. Horribly complex systems are inherently unsafe. Worse yet the more safety features we add the greater the potential for failure. Some of the worst disasters were direct results of safety measures. Three Mile Island was caused by a stuck pressure relief value on the reactor itself. They had already been having trouble with it sticking so they put a sensor on it to indicate if it was open or closed. The thing is that one day the valve failed and stuck open and the sensor failed saying it was stuck closed. This caused an inappropriate response which came very close to a meltdown. No matter what you do things like that are going to happen and its a miracle it hasn't happened more often. Not to mention the costs of making a nuclear plant are increasing exponentially because of the safety features which aren't really doing all that much in terms of safety.

Just for reference if a nuclear plant does go in a worst case scenario event its going to probably kill more than 100 thousand people and ruin miles of land for a long time. When you loose coolant the fuel melts and the puddles at the bottom of the reactor. There it heats even more until it burns through the bottom of the reactor. It still doesn't stop there and is hot enough to actually melt through the concrete floor. The build up of the steam from this eventually causes a steam explosion that blows the containment dome apart and spreads radioactive material for miles as it gets blown by the wind. The funny part is that the radioactive cloud actually stays airborne for awhile and can end up coming down directly in the center of cities miles away that were originally thought to be safe.

Its just horribly irresponsible to keep using a technology that has already killed tens of thousands (Chernobyl) and will eventually kill many more. This is even more so when we have other energy sources that demonstrably work without the possibility of all those deaths. Its even more ridiculous that the main motivating factor is that currently nuclear power costs a little less so its perfectly ok to risk human life and ecological catastrophe. (This is very ironic considering all the hoopla about wind power bird deaths that is blown out of proportion and no where near as bad as a nuclear accident.) There simply is no logical reason to ever build a nuclear power plant. The land is basically useless forever (in human terms) once the plant it decommissioned. Tons (about 740,000 tons in the US) of depleted Uranium is just dumped or used for bullets essentially dumping it on other countries. The left over dirt from the mining of the Uranium in the first place is also dangerously radioactive and is also simply dumped somewhere. Nuclear also takes much longer to build and get operational than wind or intermediate size solar. Then there is the spent fuel problem.

Speaking of spent fuel:
Current reactors produce about 20 tons of spent fuel per year per reactor and we already have 59,000 tons stockpiled in cooling pools. There are currently 104 nuclear reactors operating in the US making 2080 tons of spent fuel a year. We'd need to increase that number by at least 3 if not 4 times to get the majority of our power from nuclear so that's 6000 to 8000 tons of spent fuel a year on top of the 59,000 tons we already have no where to put. Last I heard in February Yucca mountain was no longer under consideration as a dumping place. It turns out it was a pretty bad place to being with having once been an active volcano.

So now we have almost 60,000 tons of highly dangerous spent fuel (and more coming everyday) sitting in relatively non-secure, sometimes not very safe, and in most cases decades old cooling pools. Cooling pools that already tend to leak and if the water ever gets below a certain level the rest will basically boil off and even before that the radiation in the pool room would be deadly. After that it'll catch fire and burn loosing highly radioactive smoke into the air which would be carried by the wind most likely to populated areas. Its basically as bad as a meltdown in terms of contamination. Nuclear fission was just a bad idea to begin with and has only gotten worse with time.

Thanks for all that man. I guess I'll be changing my position on fission reactors then.


And on the lithium-ion batteries for electrics, I found this article somewhat amusing from the New York Times: In Bolivia, Untapped Bounty Meets Nationalism. If the indigenous people of Bolivia can screw over American mega-corps, I say let's go full steam ahead with this.

And heading back to fusion technology: Let's hope this group's crazy idea works...

Last I read, conservative estimates of bird kills by a world powered on bird-killing wind turbines would be much, much, much less than the slaughter we perform on nigh-immeasurable species all around the world on a daily basis. Hardly a great justification, but it puts it into perspective at least. What's another few million bird bodies among foundations?

If you want efficient solar energy production then stop thinking about putting them on a planetary surface. put them in orbit and have the collected power sent via microwave energy transmission, that way you cut out the atmospheric dilution and get far more energy from light, not to mention space is so goddamn big that you don't have to worry about owning large areas of property.

Also, if you want humanity to advance, fission energy is going to be necessary. Full stop. Saying that fission shouldn't be used because it could kill hundreds of people in a worst case scenario is like saying we shouldn't allow commerical flight because there is a worst case scenario of a plane being ripped apart over a city into ten thousand pieces of wreckage and every single piece hitting someone fatally. And the jet fuel landing on a tire factory and starting a poisonous rubber fire that spreads fumes over the whole state. Also, your description of a worst-case seems to be hinging on the plant crew having a gulag-enforced level of incompetence where instead of actually doing something to avert the crisis, they stand back and let it happen for fear of being blamed for making it worse. Actual reactors are designed with countless fall-backs and safeties so that if anything happens, it gets stopped early.

(The reason so many people died at chernobyl was - in addition to crippling incompetence - crowds gathering to watch the pretty light spewing out of the reactor on account of not knowing any better, by the way.)

Furthermore, while nuclear fuel refineries can be used to make weapons grade, the sheer level of enrichment is so different (scale of around 5% enriched for fuel against 95% for weapons grade, last I checked) that it's kind of obvious if someone's making weapons-grade if you actually check instead of doing the honor system.

Lastly, the US has such bad numbers because people have been protesting any development in the field, which means we're kind of stuck at 70's level technology. if you want to see the numbers of an actual Modern Nuclear powered country, look at France.