The fact that renewable energy technology is improving is kind of irrelevant — you don't retroactively get all that progress if you purchase now, just like your nuclear reactor won't suddenly be thorium-based once that technology is worked out. You have to choose based on what's actually available. As things stand, AFAIK no renewable power source is more economical than nuclear. Hopefully they will be in the future, but building the current, inferior implementation because one day there will be a better version doesn't make sense. That's like putting a 2-year-old on the Olympic weightlifting team because he seems likely to be very strong one day.
Not sure what you're getting at with the "retroactively" bit. What I mean is renewables are feasible now, and next year they will be appreciably better, and the year after that even more so... this is not a pace of improvement I see in nuclear power, and yet I am supposed to be amazed by its price (cough) and potential (irrelevant since reactors are built to last 50 years; renewable stuff can be upgraded far more easily, in pieces)
Coat the countryside with wind turbines--it's what they've done near the SF area, although you'll note that as far as I can tell no turbines are visible from any point within what is generally considered "the Bay Area"... San Franciscans just NIMBY their power into the back yards of the "less enlightened".
As I understand it, current wind technology requires a lot more land (like, an order of magnitude) and intensive maintenance if you want to get even in the same ballpark of energy output, and that's assuming a location that's good for wind power. You can hardly just drop wind turbines into an existing plant to multiply the energy output like they're planning to do here with nuclear reactors.
