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Yeah, but somebody things those "barren windswept spots" are vast natural treasures that should not be ruined so we can play Nintendo.
Also, they tend to be far away from the places where the people actually want the electricity. I'd guess Dutch windmills are also much less quaint if you have 8 of them per acre for 10,000 acres.
Tehachopi (SoCal) and Altamont Pass (NoCal) are visually interesting and don't really bother me (and I live almost within visual distance of Altamont). But I don't know that I would like them reproduced anywhere on the scale necessary to provide broad energy relief.
That's part of the reason I don't understand the fear of nuclear power. Yes, it has a small potential for significant environmental if something goes wrong. But almost every other form of power generation (that can produce the levels of energy we need) has the significant environment impact designed into it. Coal produces more polution, by design, than nuclear would produce in an anything-but-worst-case containment failure. Industrial solar and wind would require distorting and destroying the land equivelant of the Rocky Mountain states. Hydroelectric is the cleanest energy we've ever produced on a mass scale and it has resulted in the most destructive land use policies in the history of world.
In 40 years of nuclear energy in this country using mostly first generation designs we have never experienced either a radiation fatality nor a significant radiation release. Our one mechanical failure should actually have been trumpeted as a success. Three Mile Island did exactly what any nuclear reactor should do in case of failure. Many other countries get a significant source of their power from nuclear using 3rd or 4th generation designs and haven't experienced even minor failures.
Chernobyl was a ****-up but it was almost cocked-up by design. It had barely even rudimentary safety features and was misdesigned to almost make containment failure inevitable. It's kind of like abandoning cars because the Pinto tended to explode.
Storage of waste is a problem, but at least it is one that can be worked on and is mostly skewed by the inability of most people to make rational evaluations of risk. Storage of waste byproducts from our other sources of energy isn't really even a technical feasibility.
I am heartened because while nuclear is still mostly tabboo in "green politics," we are starting to see more and more prominent environmentalists saying it is at least something that needs to be put back on the table.
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