Earthling: I'm not that familiar with the US, but there's certainly a lot of scope for solar concentration along the lines of what Spain's doing. I believe the largest such plant currently in existence is actually in the Mojave.
I'm not sure what your hydro-electric situation is like, as you do have some very large mountains and rivers but you also have some fairly acute water issues in parts of the country and the risks of climate change exacerbating that.
One key with wind farms, though, is that ordinary land-owners can get in on the action and make some money from them. Anywhere there's private land ownership and wind, there's potential for that. Texas actually has the world's largest single wind farm currently, organised by a cotton farmer and paying dividends to several hundred landowners. You try showing me small businesses and remote communities making money off nuclear power.
I think the real problem is people simply don't understand how much energy can actually be gotten from these sources. To replace, say, a 1000MW coal power plant which will have an average output of about 7500 gWh per year, you would need about 2600 MW of wind power due to intermittency. That's, say, 1300 2MW turbines, across several sites anywhere on a country's electrical grid. The Danes and Spanish get pretty significant chunks of their total power needs from wind and solar, and are actually net exporters as a result.
Likewise, solar concentrating plants are still in their infancy everywhere except Spain (I can't believe we're not building dozens of them here), but they're competitive with other power generation sources in many areas, and can be pretty reliable as baseload power because they gradually ramp up and down over a period of hours. And photovoltaic panels, though expensive, coincide with peak demand periods in hot countries, which raises the price of the specific electricity they're competing with and makes them much more competitive than raw per-KWH terms would suggest.
I've posted this before but it bears repeating:
"It's only in Spanish, but Spain got well over half its power from solar, wind and hydro on January 6th. If my maths is right, that's 40% for wind, 17% hydro, 20% other "special regimen" power (cogeneration, biomass, solar).
For the entirity of 2010, the percentage contribution (table on page 7, chapter 1) to final demand was about 30% wind/hydro/solar, 27% gas/fuel/combined cycle, 21% nuclear, 9% coal, and 14% "special regime".
But, you know, renewable electricity generation is a total pipedream."
Efficiency can be defined in multiple ways. The resources to make a nuclear power facility, including the land and materials used in construction, are, in the end, wholly less than a gigantic wind or solar farm. The energy output from a much smaller facility, over a much longer period of time, is much higher than from the massive farm required to match it. Green energy costs a lot of money, takes a ton of natural resources, including oil products which I believe is simply ridiculous in comparison to those for a nuclear plant. The environmental costs and long term use of facilities make nuclear a much smarter option and it always has been. Agenda driven ecofreaks don't realize they are hurting the planet more by working against it.
You're right, there's embedded fossil fuels in renewable energy. But there is in nuclear as well - how do you think all the mining equipment is run, and what everything is transported with and processed with? That embedded fossil fuel subsidy exists in everything we do.
I'm also afraid you're simply wrong about the land use impacts as well. Wind farms do need to cover a lot of ground in order to be effective baseload power with minimal intermittency, but that land is still available for other use. 1300 turbines could cover, say, a combined total of 20 square kilometres, but that's distributed over multiple sites and still smaller than the impact of an equivalent coal station and its associated mine which can be more than 50 square kilometres once you include the area impacted by tailings and other waste. A solar concentrating plant uses less land still, and of course plastering solar panels over every building possible, while still expensive, uses no land whatsoever.
Given that nuclear power involves uranium mining and uranium enrichment and the waste products from those activities, water for cooling including runoff impacts on some unfortunate patch of ecosystem, and the need for waste disposal, I doubt the whole life-cycle land impact is really that minimal.
And I'd appreciate if you refrained from terms like "ecofreaks". Such abusive dismissal of serious people and well-thought-out proposals is not conducive to civilised discussion.
amnit, mis-clicked and voted for nuclear power everywhere. Guess I'm all for it 
