It therefor makes sense to run large earhmoving plant and mining plant on CNG because they load and dump and return to a load site and have a closed loop haul circuit , consume a lot of diesel, 1500L per 12 hoiur shift and are concentrated in one location. If anyone knows of a mine running on this basis I would appreciate the feedback please.

DOD and the British tried to make weapons grade material out of power reactor waste and it didn’t go well, the bombs are more difficult to make and they fizzled anyway. Anyone wanting to make a plutonium bomb would build a heavy water fast neutron reactor or a graphite pile reactor, not a power reactor.

The nuclear waste issues will be resolved through technical means. There are several ‘deep burn’ projects now being pursued to eliminate the waste through re-use and transmutation. Also, one of the Gen. IV designs called the Molten Salt Reactor, or Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactor, can be feed transurantic waste and burn it down to short lived fission products. Build a couple dozen of these and over 50 years we could probably get rid of the majority of Neptunium 327. High level waste (which is largely fission products, not transuranics) can be vitrified, Their half lives reach up to 30 years, by the time the glass they are fixed in erodes and releases them, they will be have been cold for centuries.

All of your economic arguments are dated or skewed. First of all, as Germany is waking up to realize with their news that they are going to have to build 18 new coal plants as they phase out their nuclear plants, the only real alternative for base load generators are coal fired plants. The cost of a new coal fired plant the size of a nuclear plant is around $2bln dollars for the very same reasons that the price for the nuclear plants have gone up. There has also been and inversion concerning the two. There is now less opposition (except for people apparently lobotomized in the 1970′s towards nuclear than coal. Kansas, for instance, completely blocked the production of a new coal plant on environmental grounds. So far there has only been fairly flaccid opposition to the nuclear plants being proposed.

I personally see the opposition to nuclear power to be extremely immoral. Coal has blood on it from miners deaths, both acute and due to long term chronic diseases. Do a quick Google earth on Southern West Virgina and North Eastern Kentucky. Keep the zoom around 5-6 clicks up from the bottom. All those irregular tan patches are what is left of mountain tops that have been pushed over into adjacent valleys to get at the coal under them. How does one add in the cost of this scale of destruction to coal generated electricity? The damage is extensive now, but this is just a snapshot of an ongoing process. This also constitutes a mind blowing amount of petroleum. It takes a lot of energy to do that scale of earth moving, we dig out 3.8 billions tons of coal a year, but that is a fraction of the tonnage of earth that needs to be moved. We also transport all that coal across the country. That can’t be a low carbon process either.

Coal sits in the ground as a giant Brita filter, absorbing mercury, chromium, arsenic, lead, uranium and thorium, in addition to other heavy metals. 40% of all the mercury pollution in the environment comes from coal combustion, how does one put a price on this level of destruction? Burning coal also produces micro-particulate pollution that no less than the Bush administration estimates kills 12,000 Americans a year. We are burning more and more of the dirty brown coal.

Finally, the price of coal per ton is now around $100. It was, a couple years ago, $25. The major expense that an operator of coal plant has to deal with is the price of fuel. It will take half a billion dollars in recurring cost to run the coal plant, over against $10 in capital cost plus $30 mln in recurring cost for a nuclear plant. Coal will probably be up to $200 a ton by the time the control rods are moved out on the first new plant in this country, and I am being extremely conservative in my estimate. That is a billion dollars a year in recurring cost without cap and trade or similar tax structures to make coal come close to what it really costs us. A Westinghouse AP-1000 is supposed to last 60 years, amortize these figures out and see if it isn’t cheaper to go nuclear in strictly economic terms and then throw in the differences in pollution and environmental terms and see if it is more desirable in moral terms, even with the tiny amounts of waste it produces.

In terms of transportation, use the overnight excess capacity of the nuclear power plant to power plasma guns to make SynGas out of our garbage in a Coskata-like method of ethanol production. During the overnight period one could make enough syngas to feed huge arrays of bio-reactors 24/7. This, plus plug-in hybrids and electric cars, which should be commercially available when the proposed nuclear plants come on line, would also decrease our need for oil.

Yes nuclear power may be able to offset some of the use of natural gas in power plants (and oil is used in very, very few power plants in the US mainly in AK and HI) but there are several problems with this.

1. Nuclear power is great for baseload power which is sometimes provided by natural gas plants but the majority of natural gas plants are highly inefficient peaker plants which are basically inverted jet engines and run only when needed for times of high demand. Nuclear power cannot fill this gap.

2. Construction of new nuclear plants is extremely expensive undertaking. How expensive? Well we don’t know. During the decline of nuclear power in the 1980s most new plants overran costs projections by hundreds of percent and billions of dollars. It is estimated that any new plants will cost about $3 B but no one knows – they cost that much in the 80s and judging by inflation I think at least $10 B is a fair estimate. Much talk has been made about standardization of nuke plants but currently there are a few designs being put forth by GE, Westinghouse, etc. And several will need to be built before any standardization occurs. Add that to the fact that Wall Street has refused to back the construction of nukes due to the uncertainty of prices, NIMBYism, general opposition to nukes (although declining), the unknowns of nuke waste (see below). These financial problems persist after billions in subsidies, loan guarantees, and liability caps. Finally, deregulation of utilities has raised the cost of debt to generators because they can no longer pawn off their costs on ratepayers – which was also questioned by the Supreme Court (see Duquense Light Co. v. Barasch)

3. Nuclear waste still is an unresolved issue. If Yucca ever opens up, which I doubt, it will not be long before it has been filled. Already Nevada has sued as will every state that the trains pass through on their way to Yucca. On site storage seems to be working but many of the older sites are running out of space which is a serious problem for the companies and a major concern for local citizens. Deep hole boring also seems like a good idea but reliable cost estimates are not available and no long term studies about seepage have been conducted.

All that being said I don’t think nukes will help our liquid fuels or our electricity problems. Reprocessing is no solution either it is cost-ineffective and still leaves substantial waste which is then weapons grade. Not good. Hate to rain on your parade but its back to the drawing board.

CNG can be a good alternative as an intermediate solution to hydrogen power. As mentioned in http://www.grumpyoldman.be/grumpys-news-flashes-xx/ one seems to have understood this in The Netherlands. One doesn’t seem to be that far yet. There is only one car available and there aren’t any public filling stations. Thus one need to pay 4780 Euro for the filling station at home + 800 euro extra installation costs.

Eddy