Robert Zubrin says yes.
You know, it’s kind of sad that no one is willing to invest in nuclear energy anymore. Wait, what? NuScale Power celebrated the news of its company-saving $30 million investment from Fluor Corp. Thursday morning with a press conference in Washington, D.C. Fluor is a design, engineering and construction company involved with some 20 plants in the 70s and 80s, but it has not held interest in a nuclear energy company until now. Fluor, which has deep roots in the nuclear industry, is betting big on small-scale nuclear energy with its NuScale investment. "It's become a serious contender in the last decade or so," John Hopkins, [Fluor’s group president in charge of new ventures], said. And that brings us to NuScale, which had run into some dark days – maybe not as dark as, say, Solyndra, but dire enough : Earlier this year, the Securities Exchange Commission filed an action against NuScale's lead investor, The Michael Kenwood Group. The firm "misap
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That said, I think he's probably barking up the wrong tree here.
Aside from the dubious economics, there's several technical issues which makes this alternative less likely.
If you're going to make liquid fuels from coal for OPEC-busting, the process of making diesel from coal is not very different to making methanol, and there are already car and truck engines in mass production using the stuff.
As an extra bonus, diesel engines are much more efficient than spark-ignition engines because of the much higher compression ratio.
In any case, this doesn't solve the problem of carbon dioxide emissions from combustion, which are highly likely to be the subject of regulation soon.
For what it's worth, my best guess is that plug-in hybrids with increasingly long all-electric ranges, hopefully powered by nuclear electricity, will become increasingly commonplace through the 2010s.
With dedicated Ethanol/Methanol engines the achievable efficiency is actually HIGHER than the efficiency of diesels.
With a high temperature reactor as process heat source the "mine to wheel" efficiency would be higher than either hydrogen fuel cell or battery electric. And it is doable with the existing liquid fuel infrastructure and without much retooling the existing car fleet.
Also gets away from the rising commodity prices for battery or fuel-cell materials.
- Klaus