When you consider that solar energy can be co-sited with many other land-uses, the situation gets even better. Residential, commercial, or industrial buildings, highway rights-of-way (not on the freakin' roadways, but alongside), or of course, high-potential solar in desert or other largely empty space.
Coal fails for multiple reasons, including in the long term that there's simply not enough of it: the global R/P ratio is 113, that is, there are 113 years' supply at present rates of use. And that rate is increasing -- the R/P ratio has fallen from above 200 in 1993 to just over 100 in 2013. Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy, June, 2014 http://bp.com/statisticalreview
Then there's that little issue about global warming.
Solar has markedly little waste issue. The life of PV panels is 20-25 years, they're comprised largely of silicon, and other materials can be recycled from them.
Total present US energy usage (not just electricity generation) could be provided from a region 233 miles on a side (54,400 mi^2). Via GNU units and some fairly standard values:
You have: 100 quad / (1 kW/m^2 * 0.3 * 0.17 * 0.9 * 0.55 * 0.94 * 1 year )
You want: mi^2
* 54397.603
/ 1.8383163e-05
You have: sqrt(54397.603)
You want:
Definition: 233.23294
Switch instead to solar thermal, and you're now free of virtually anyThe more significant problem is that there are more humans, consuming more resources, by a long stretch, than the Earth can support. We might be able to provide for 3-4 billions sustainably, but at a standard of living equivalent to slums of Manilla, Kolkata, or the favellas of Rio. Or worse.
Or 500 million to 2 billion at a higher rate of resource consumption, though likely markedly lower than that of the present-day US.
The thing about those 1.8 million security forces is that they represent themselves a vast level of resource allocation that's not itself directly productive. It's an overhead that other energy systems don't require.
Your land-area charts mostly show that biofuels aren't viable. I don't disagree with that conclusion:
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2cvap7/the_intr...
(More: http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search?q=biofuels&restri...)
Note that the delta for nuclear and solar isn't particularly significant, again noting that solar power can be co-located with other land uses.
I'd also strongly suggest you actually read and view my references before responding, as several of these aspects are addressed. And you've wholly avoided addressing the large-scale, long-term, unavoidable systemic risks of nuclear.