Which isn't trivial but there is no perfect solution, even wind and solar have externalities. We will always have some impact on the planet, but I will take erosion over a totally broken ecosystem. Erosion is inevitable over time, and if we don't reduce emissions and the seas rise, erosion will be abit of a moot point.

Every choice we make has compromises, but I think coal pollution is magnitudes worse than soil erosion.

One affects the entire environment with air pollution, and the other affects a localized area by modifying terrain.

We can do without beaches. We can give up some land, and some spawning grounds for fish. If it means we can help against global warming, it is clearly the lesser of two evils.

New water reservoirs initially emit a lot of GHGs due to decaying organic matter, it takes decades for them to become carbon neutral.

I wonder what is worse: the consumption of sand for manufacturing, construction, and man-made islands & beaches or the loss of sand generation that dams cause.

As a counter point, the danger of damns stops when the damn is empty. The danger of nuclear waste is on a longer time-scale. Hence it might be that there are future deaths due to current nuclear power that are not being counted.

I say might, because there is no way of knowing how many deaths will occur (or even statistically should be expected to occur) simply because we don't know what will happen to the nuclear waste.

I favor nuclear, but I'd love to see hard numbers on the 'headroom' nuclear has on deaths/GWH compared to dams, with some argument about whether long-term nuclear waste storage is likely to be less deadly than that headroom.