[MertsA]

If you're just talking about potential loss hydropower is not the argument you want to make here. Just the Banqiao dam failure alone has caused far more fatalities than nuclear power ever has including Chernobyl.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Even just recently in the United States the Oroville dam came pretty close to catastrophe and required the evacuation of 188,000 people. Repairing the Oroville dam cost $1.1 billion, even back in the 70s the Teton Dam collapse cost over $300 million.

I'm all in favor of using hydroelectric power in places where we need to build a dam to control flooding but building a dam for power alone is ecologically damaging, floods tons of land, and even if you wanted to try to build more, there's not a lot of suitable locations.

As for the complexity of keeping a nuclear reactor under control, this isn't the 50s, we have reactor designs that are dramatically safer than older reactors, we aren't building them. I think you're wrong about trying to conserve energy as well. I'm not saying that we should waste it, but real conservation of energy isn't going to happen without significantly changing our current lifestyles. We don't need to do that if we just invest in sustainable clean energy in the form of nuclear power in the first place.