TWENTY NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS - Fifty Percent of the nation's energy needs.

[jeff47]

35. Hydro is pretty much tapped out in the US

We've already built giant hydro plants at the good locations for hydro. We're not gonna get much more power from "Hoover dam-style" hydro. Plus, flooding vast swaths of land is kinda unpopular these days.

There's some folks working on hydro using lower volumes of water, which would increase the number of useful sites. But this suffers from the fact that there's a lot less energy to recover from the water. It's not clear that we'll be able to get much power from that.

While pumped hydro is great for the Swiss, it isn't gonna work for the vast majority of this country. Folks near the Rockies could use it, for example. But most of the country is too flat. The tiny "mountains" near here would require vast reservoirs to store any significant energy, and "vast reservoir" and "mountain" are not easily combined.