I am running Hardy, 8.04, i386 my AMD dual core and went to upgrade it to 8.10. abut ten minutes intoupgrade the upgrade I lost power and being on battery I stopped the upgrade and shut it down. Now I have 527 upgrades available but cannot have them, I receive the following;

Could not calculate the upgrade

A unresolvable problem occurred while calculating the upgrade.

This can be caused by:
* Upgrading to a pre-release version of Ubuntu
* Running the current pre-release version of Ubuntu
* Unofficial software packages not provided by Ubuntu

This is most likely a transient problem, please try again later.

Is there any easy way out of this mess?

... If I download the Ubuntu 8.10 alternate install image and burn the disk can I get out of this pickle?

If you mean doing a clean install with the alternate CD, then yes, that would fix it.
Ubuntu 9.04 is the current version, so you may as well download that instead. Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 is in beta now. Karmic will be finalized by the end of October.