We know we could extract uranium from seawater. The prototypes would scale. The reason we don’t do that is that there is no economic reason to do that: it would be more expensive than mining, so why bother? However, even at that higher cost, it would still be plenty cheap enough to use in our power plants.

You complain about people overblowing a minor concern with solar, but you do the same with uranium extraction.

Also, I take issue with your suggestion that we can do pumped storage at scale: we can’t. There are not a lot of suitable sites for that: we either lack enough altitude delta, or lack water, or would have to flood huge swaths of land, often already more productively used. I like hydro, and I like pumped storage, but unlike nuclear, you can’t do it just about anywhere.

US is actually particularly lucky when it comes to hydro: most other countries are too flat, too dry, or too short on wastelands. Even if we could pull it off, most can’t, and they need power too.