Of course it’s not impossible. We’re talking about a nation that built a hundred thousand aircraft a year in 1944. Think the US couldn’t manage a similar effort with renewables? Politically infeasible and very expensive are not the same as impossible.

The nuke-vs. Solar debate always reminds me of when the Marketing department of IBM pronounced that there would be no more than – four, or was it six? – computers in the world, eventually. Now we are communicating on the WWW. It seems like engineering types are always wedded to the Big Bang / Centralised solution and think the distributed version will never work, but surely we’re the living denial of that right now as we put fingers to keyboard.

This is why I’m really hoping Obama gets elected – aside from really not liking McCain, I figure if Obama (against all odds) starts listening to reality and not wishful thinking and scaremongering on nukes, he might have a chance to get it done, in a “Nixon to China” way…

Have you ever said, “I expected rain, but it looks like the sun is shining,” and then had someone respond, “Oh, what an ignoramus, the sun is always out there shining even when it happens to be raining on earth”? Probably not. Anyone who acted like that in real life would be either autistic or else just a blowhard; everyone else knows better than to pretend that they don’t understand anything other than literal meanings.

You guys must be very tiresome at parties.

“Hey, it’s been great; my wife and I are about to take off.” “Oh really? I don’t see an airplane.”

“These sandwiches are to die for.” “Are you really so desperate that you’d give up your life for a sandwich?”

“It’s raining cats and dogs out there.” “Actually, that’s just ordinary water falling from the sky—a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen.”

is nuclear power really “renewable”? the amount of uranium in the earth is finite, after all.

Not a big problem, actually. Firstly, peak load arises when air conditioners are going full tilt, i.e. on hot sunny afternoons, which is just when solar (either thermal or PV) would peak. Secondly, there’s at least one proven way to store large amounts of energy: pumped hydroelectric storage. Ideally you have a reservoir up a hill – but you can get the same effect with a deep hole in the ground. Underground compressed air, and big tanks of high-pressure steam, can also be quite effective. Flywheels can do a decent job but AFAIK they aren’t actually cost-competitive: raising water a couple hundred feet can store a huge amount of energy, and the cost is proportional to the charge and discharge rate, not the total energy capacity.

Where battery technology really matters is for transport. There you need some form of energy storage with high energy density (MJ/kg), low risk of explosive release (a definite concern for flywheels) , high power discharge rate (for decent acceleration), and ideally also even higher charge rate (for regenerative braking).

That’s a lot tougher than the constraints for electricity-grid load-levelling.