You Americans always tell me (European), just how big your country is. When we talk about nuclear energy my worries of nuclear waste are always countered with: "We have enough empty space".

There are literally oil fields with millions of tons of steel moving about, but suddenly with wind energy space with moving metal structures in it is a problem? I don't buy that the opposition to wind energy is entirely rational.

People aren't rational. If people were rational we would have been building exclusively nuclear, wind, solar and other clean power generation for the past 40+ years and coal power would have been history decades ago. Natural gas would have been niche power generation for special use cases.