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What's more concerning, a corrupt or incompetent government mishandling one ton of nuclear fuel, or the same corrupt/incompetent government mishandling the one million tons of coal that would be needed to replace it? (which by the way, would have approximately the same amount of radioactive potential due to the natural radioactive contaminants that will get concentrated as you use it)

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My entire point was that we should strive for neither. We could half per-capita energy consumption in the US and still consume twice as much as Brazil. If everyone in rich countries stopped being greedy we could easily meet global demands with renewables alone.

Halving per-capita energy consumption has an economic cost in terms of reduced production, consumption and thus employment. Which will have a political cost in follow-up elections.

I don't see why we need to stop thinking about improving the environmental friendliness of our energy sources in order to start thinking about reducing overall consumption. And I'm not sure you have really justified why reducing our consumption should even be seen as a good thing given the possibility of more environmentally friendly energy sources.

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