Its in the bottom quartile worldwide I believe.
Also the recommendations for the USA are way off. The "only way" to reach this goal is apparently to build lots of wind and solar. No mention whatsoever of nuclear, which is by far the more practical solution. And far less ecologically damaging.
I vaguely follow developments in this area, and this seems to either outdated or simply untrue information.
The people building traditional nuclear don't seem to be able to do so economically, even when they punt on insurance and eventual disposal.
The people building the new nuclear which is going to eat up all the old nuclear waste don't seem to be making much progress, even in China where you'd assume they'd quite happily take a chance if this was anywhere near a viable state.
Meanwhile, solar and wind are here today and prices continue to plummet. Any sensible economic or ecological assement would take into account the fact you can have solar up and running and contributing money/carbon savings on very short timescales, and do so in a distributed fashion, whereas you're talking potentially decades for nuclear which arrives all at once in a big lump.
In fact the desert ecosystem is more sensitive to sunlight changes. Which makes sense when you think about it.
Edit: According to wikipedia, only 14.8% of China's land is arable. And that is for a country that is about the same size as the United States.
Its obvious that any kind of human activity will produce some kind of alteration to the surrounding environment.
Kill the whole planet with greenhouse gases or kill a small and already almost sterile area?
Measured by fatalities per k/W generated, nuclear is by far the safest form of power. The fear of nuclear is irrational.
Even if you were to start on new reactors today, it would take a decade to complete them; a whole lot of wind and solar are going to be deployed in a decade.
It has made it politically difficult to research and deploy safer and more cost-effective reactors.
Risk analysis has two axis - likelihood, and impact. The maximum potential impact of solar/wind plant failure is negligible - what's it going to do, fall over on someone? Meanwhile, the maximum potential impact of virtually any civilian nuclear plant is massive - release of toxins and carcinogens over large residential areas, rendering them uninhabitable.
Any respectable risk analysis requires looking at impact, not just likelihood.
The long term data (over decades) shows that nuclear kills fewer people than other forms of power generation. Maybe that will change over time (fewer people falling off of roofs when installing solar).
That data includes "high impact" events, including things like Fukushima, which evidently has not resulted in any radiation-related fatalities.
edit: An additional risk is that a nuclear plant is much more complex and expensive than a solar plant. A major accident, if nothing else, wrecks the plant, taking away a key resource that could take a decade and billions of dollars to rebuild (if it's politically possible to rebuild at all). Solar and wind, made up of collections of small units, can't suffer the same kind of unrecoverable catastrophic failure. Again, economic risk.
And yet another risk... because of the potential destructive nature, nuclear plants are obvious targets for terrorists and military action. This ties back to the ability to disable a plant and its impact. Even if it doesn't cause fatalities, taking a nuclear plant offline and forcing evacuations isn't that hard. High, high economic risk.
This is another example of your original mistake. You're narrowly focusing, and not doing a solid risk analysis. Nuclear power is riskier than solar, because the potential impact of failure is much higher.
https://www.abqjournal.com/830731/2014-nuclear-accident-at-w...
Thought experiment: how big of a nature-only walled-off preserve would we need around a nuclear plant in order to protect against that? And if that amount of area were instead covered with solar panels, how much energy would that produce?
My impression given the efficiency of nuclear is that it'd still win, plus you get a sweet nature reserve out of it.
They do tend to remove the underbrush from around the panels, probably because it's easier to install/maintain that way. You could make a case for allowing more vegetation around/under the panels.
Failures are rare, but the failure mode is catastrophic.
And the worst part for nuclear is that while solar and wind are getting significantly cheaper, nuclear is getting more expensive.
Finally, the major costs for solar/wind at the moment is storage. With electric cars, and the fact that nearly every consumer company is spending money towards cheaper electricity storage, it's just a significantly better bet at the moment.
The UK's new Hinckley point power plant is both more expensive than solar/wind and puts the UK's energy generation in Chinese hands.
There's a reason why Angela Merkel (relevant: probably the only physicist head of state) decided to shift to wind and solar.
That's actually fascinating. She was a physical chemist research scientist, not just undergraduate [1]. I wonder how many other scientist heads of state there have been.
Margaret Thatcher was a research chemist (food scientist) [2], but that's the only other one I know of.
Edit: she was the first British Prime Minister with a Science degree [3].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Merkel
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher
[3]: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n11/david-runciman/rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tatMerkel slowed down that process at a time where it stopped being that much of an issue and the process was put back on the initial schedule after Fukushima happened.
Merkel is merely going with popular opinion on this.