Synthetic Propane might be a better automobile fuel than Methane since Propane is not considered to be a greenhouse gas and it can be stored at a lower pressure in aluminum containers - propane powered forklift trucks.

Converting concentrated CO2 versus dilute (PPM) atmospheric should be much more efficient.

Yes we will eventually capture CO2 and change it back to liquid fuels. It takes energy any way you do it. No process can be more than twice as efficient as converting the CO2 to CO and H2O by adding hydrogen and then running the CO and extra H2 though the catalysts needed to produce liquid fuels. Right now the US should install large methanol factories at coal mines where CO and H2 can be made from coal or natural gas. Nuclear power can make gasoline from CO2 and water at less cost right now than gasoline costs.

This company is proposing to make powdered limestone, but it can be mined out of the hills at less cost to make identical fuels. This is just another way of increasing the CO2 level in the air from the earth. This company is trying to make it sound like they can get nearly free fuel out of CO2. Oil shale is a much better deal, as there is net carbon energy for use in an oil shale rock. The rock is actually burnt in steam power plants in some places. Every power plant could be refitted for concentrated CO2 recovery that could then be piped to nuclear power plants to turn back into fuel. Propane is a much better automobile fuel than gasoline or hydrogen. DME, dimethyl-ether, can also be stored and used like propane but diesel engines can burn it. Diesel engines can also burn high levels of propane added simply to the intake air. ..HG..

If they start with flue gas then they're still part of the problem: fossil carbon still winds up in the air as CO2. Starting with coal is worse. Using atmospheric CO2 takes more energy but it's the only carbon-neutral way to make liquid hydrocarbon vehicle fuels.

Typical insanity sold as an environmental improvement to gullible green fools. Only green idiots believe that it would be economic to take fully oxidized Carbon and deoxidize it. So they can re-oxidize it once again, and then come out ahead on that deal. Too bad the Second Law of Thermodynamics gets in the way.

@Black Sun,

Please know that Nuclear is and was cheaper than all other electric power generation and has been for a long, long, time.

Back in the '60s it was the choice of Utilities managements whose full time job was to select the lowest price methods of generation. That was long before the fossil price rises due to OPEC, in the 70s.

All the so-called "renewables" are excruciating expensive, excluding cheap hydro which for some reason in now not a renewable, according to the "green" community.

The only reason they are built is politics. No utility management would do so in their right mind, other than to assuage the green fools. They are, by far are the most expensive sources and can't live without subsidy, even in today's high fossil price environment.

Those calculations were made by people betting real money and vast sums; not monopoly paper money by academics. Nor some fool green who can't count to eleven without taking off his shoe.

The extraordinary costs created by mindless greens purposely inflating costs, changed that temporarily, for thirty years. Finally reformed laws make such stalling and cost increases illegal to do, so we return to genuine costs.

Lo and behold, the Utility managers have appeared, not two years after the final reforms were enacted, and suddenly three dozen new nuclear plants are in various stages of acquisition.

So the measure of cost has been re-established, by those actually paying the freight, now that synthetic stalling costs are made illegal. All this is spite of no construction allowances in the rate base as promoted by "consumer advocate" demagogues, buying elections with phony promises of immediately lowered rates. In return for much higher rates after plant construction is completed.

The Utilities have already included the cost of waste disposal; have billed the costs to their users, as required by law, and have paid that that fee to the federal government, as required by law too. Some are now threatening to sue the government to provide the service for which they have paid.

The Utilities have already included the cost of waste disposal; have billed the costs to their users, as required by law, and have paid that that fee to the federal government, as required by law too. Some are now threatening to sue the government to provide the service for which they have paid.

Stan, the utilities have paid some arbitrary amount for disposal set by the government, which is "supposed" to cover waste disposal. But that doesn't mean we have any clue as to what it will ultimately cost.

Government is notorious for setting fees on a political basis. It's pure speculation. We don't know what it will cost to get Yucca Mountain open, and given likely restrictions and conditions, we don't even know what it will cost to transport the waste there if or when the time comes.

Plus, Yucca Mountain will be filled to capacity with just the backlog of existing waste.

What we have are hundreds of operating nuke plants that are also semi-permanent above-ground waste repositories. Until and unless this situation changes, nuke advocates are ignoring the elephant in the room.

Stan, your smear "green fools" pretty much discredits you with regard to even being able to discuss issues of sustainability. If not through green tech and green policy, what's your plan for closing loops and dealing with unpaid externalities economy-wide?

@Gary and Black Sun,

American peace-niks decided to "set an example" in non proliferation, by a futile gesture in not reprocessing reactor fuels. This costly decision solved nothing, and accomplished zilch, except to get weeks worth of newspaper headlines, forty years ago.

It makes the waste disposal issue even bigger. Reprocessing to get the unused fuel out and reused, cuts the load on Yucca mountain by 90%, making it unlikely Yucca would ever be outgrown. It is better to get out the non-used fuel that is still in them, even though no one made a bomb from recycled fuel rods.

No one followed. Everyone else burns MOX and we are edging in that direction too, the sooner the better. Provided that the fools don't continue in office at the green establishments.

We need to burn fissile materials and transmute Transuranics to close the Fuel cycle, as Black Sun notes, even if he does not understand how to do it.

Getting rid of the Transuranics, Plutonium, Americium, etc, would make Yucca waste safe in a hundred years or so instead of thousands, and cut the quantities by 90% or more. But the enviro "leadership" would rather have radioactive materials lying around for some reason, rather than deal with the issue and solve it. Perhaps they thought this would prevent the Nuclear Renaissance, Sorry about that. And 19 have progressed enough to be seeking Combined Construction and Operating Licenses from the NRC.

Four have signed contracts to be constructed by the Utilities, meaning that the financing was arranged and in place. The thirty- five plants in the pipeline, up from zero in two short years, will raise our non-Carbon generation to over 33% from nuclear by 2016, less than a decade from now. They will provide the power for the fleets of Electrified cars that are coming.

@Gary,

Non existent Breeders not due until the late 2020s, are not the best Transuranic Actinide Burning plants. The still non-existent Fusion plants due a decade or so there after will be better. The Fusion neutrons @14 MEV, are energetic enough to "crack" any transuranic atom. Encapsulating Transuranics in containers in the Lithium breeding blankets are easy to do, and will add little complexity to a Fusion plant, except to make it more economically rewarding to construct.

I see few ways that breeders can be made as safe as the GEN III+ LWR designs, now abuilding. Nor the real benefit from designing or building them, except for one or two dedicated as Actinide Burners, perhaps built and operated by the TVA for the DOE. But one-offs are always very expensive. If Fusion were still a hypothetical concern, then breeders represent a backstop alternative; but Fusion is a certainty now. The last two major plasma instabilities have been conquered (RWM and ELM). All the advances that have been made while the debate about ITER took place, makes it only a a full scale confirming rather than a needed advance. After ITER, the next step is the first Commercial Fusion Demonstration plant, that will add electricity ot the grid.