Regardless of all the cons and pros with the need for power versus the affect, or not, on the environment, let's face the fact that everyone of us is constantly creating a demand for electricity. No one that I know, including me, is prepared or can give up the 'essential luxury' of electrical power to give us the standard of living we enjoy today.
If we, mankind as a whole, was really worried about the effects of our activities on wildlife then we would give up all modern technology and go back to a time when we just lived off the land immediately around us. But of course we will not because we do not want to sacrifice what we have.
Mankind has affected other life on this planet ever since we came into existence in some form or another. But that should not be a problem because we are part of the whole; God / nature put us here, created our desire to continually evolve and advance, using the planet to fulfil our needs. That is what was intended, and none of us within the history of mankind was ever able to change our direction and hunger for advance. Only natural plagues and man-made wars have short term slowed down this progress, although because of these events we have in the long term advanced significantly after the sacrifice.
The problem now, as I see it, is that mankind is unsure of the best way to go forward, meeting our needs with the apparent dilemma about how we affect the planet. It is a self inflicted psychological dilemma, as whatever we do is nothing compared to the scale of nature itself and we are inflating our perceived involved in that gigantic process. But we still beat ourselves up over something that is not within our control.
I am not saying we do nothing; humans have never done that! No we should pursue more efficient ways to produce the power we demand for reasons of economy. That IS nuclear power, not crazy windfarms or other so called harnessing of nature devises that can never be of sufficient numbers to produce the power we require, are an unnecessary blot on the environmental landscape, and in fact do have a significant cost during their manufacture, transportation, erection / construction and future use.
So the choice for mankind is this. We either stop using power or we accept there is a cost whatever we do on the environment as there always has been, and just build the most efficient, suitable and economically viable generation equipment to produce our electricity. No political pleasing of this that and the other NGO, lobbying movement, aunt Sally in the street, but just sound logical decision making to produce what we really need in viable quantities. Nuclear power has been that answer for 50 years, and with development can be the answer for generations to come.