Reply #73: Actually the folks around here at Oyster Creek were worried the reactor

[NNadir]

would close. It has been great for their tax base it creates zero pollution and keeps their electrical bills low.

Irrespective of these wise folks, NIMBY is a powerful argument against nuclear power, but you are completely niave when you assume that it will NOT be an issue in biodiesel, particularly when the program - if it manages to be sustainable in some areas - goes industrial. To wit, it will involve the building of tens of thousands of rather smelly plants.

Most nuclear power thinkers these days are thinking in terms of remote nuclear parks. My personal idea nuclear park would be a park having one or two PWR units running in the Radowsky fuel conformation to burn plutonium in a thorium matrix, two or three CANDU type reactors to burn out the energy from the SEU left over from the PWR, and three or four high temperature reactors for providing water gas reactions for DME, plastic intermediates for jet fuel and the like, and methane/ethane mixes. The most advanced of these proposals include a reactor like an accelerator driven subcritical reactor to burn minor actinides and transmute especially. The plants will all each have a processing facility designed to acheive via a fission/breeding scheme total burn up, as close to 100% of the thorium uranium and plutonium and transplutonium actinides sent to it.

Frankly if people did not have knee jerk terrror reactions (based wholly on ignorance) to the word "nuclear," anti-nuclear NIMBY would disappear and we could probably see the public on other plants like the one near oyster creek. (Its funny that they had to change the name of the NMRI Device to MRI because they couldn't have a word like "nuclear" in it. The devide has no radioactivity in it, just a supercooled magent and a radio pulse transmitter.) Though nuclear NIMBY it a reality today, when cheap oil literally and figuratively clouds the air, what I'm trying to promote is the abandonment of this particularly fractious form of ignorance on which nuclear NIMBY thrives. We can in fact, save the atmosphere AND have relatively low cost energy with which to address the issues of poverty. The technical case is overwhelming. The social (fear) case is not.

As it is in many areas, it does not help of course to have the Bushies around, who have exploited fear of things nuclear in order to steal oil. There's more than a tiny bit of irony that they were able to use that fear to allow themselves to plunder the cities of the ancient cresent, kill their children, demolish their homes, etc, etc.

It may be that VW and Daimler are focusing on biodiesel and not DME. This decision, which is bad for air quality overall, may or may not prove to be economically wise, particularly when some fool comes along with a motor fuel at 2/3 or less the cost, down the road a piece. It really doesn't matter though, if biodesiel isn't nirvana, there are only a few seals and changes to the injectors that are required to convert the engine to DME when it proves cheaper, cleaner and easier to obtain. Personally I have a fondness for seeing the sky, and so I think I'll hold out for DME.

Look though, I support biodiesel research. Nothing would make me happier than to see you succeed and to build an economically viable industry. If you can do it, by all means do so. You will be arresting the Greenhouse effect to some extent. If you can prove your skill on the same scale as nuclear has, you will achieved a powerful step toward sustainable energy.