Given that production will soon decline rapidly in North America, and the great majority of the world’s remaining reserves lie in Russia and the Middle East, we should try to reduce use of gas wherever possible, and save this limited commodity for applications for which there are few practical alternatives to gas. These include peak power generation, space heating, cogeneration (CHP) applications, and chemical feedstock (for fertilizer, etc..).

The best answer for transportation is to use plug-in hybrid and/or pure electric cars. Fuel derived from biomass sources (other than corn ethanol) may also have a role. The electricity to power these cars can come from nuclear, renewable, or clean coal (w/ sequestration) sources. The cars can charge at night, making use of existing, spare generation and grid capacity.

Uranium is a ubiquitous metal in the earth’s crust, and we’ve barely started even looking for it. Now that the uranium price is higher, we hear about new discoveries almost every day. It’s discovery cost (dollars spent to find per unit energy produced) is 300 times less than that of oil. In the 1920’s, when the situation for oil was similar to the situation for uranium today (in terms of how much time and effort had been spent looking for it) the known reserves were only ~1% of what we subsequently discovered. The reason people are talking about running out of oil is that we have discovered very little new oil for decades, despite massive efforts. This is nowhere near the case for uranium, for which the discovery process/period is only just beginning.

On top of this is the fact that, unlike oil and gas, the raw uranium ore cost is a tiny fraction (only a few percent) of the overall nuclear electricity price. Thus, even an order of magnitude increase in ore cost has only a modest effect on overall economics. At such a higher price, lower-concentration sources of uranium become practical and economic, which results in an orders of magnitude increase in expoitable reserves.

I talk more about this at:

http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html

and a uranium mining expert dicusses it at:

http://216.94.150.122/ investor_relations/ speeches/ speech_text.php?spid=49

The Natural Gas would be a better substitute as a transportation fuel instead of using all those tar sands, tar shales and coal processing for oil.

We now make about 20 percent of our electricity with Natural Gas, which is what makes no sense. Natural Gas is to valuable for home and industrial heat and possibly for transportation than to make electricity from it.

” Of great interest are the terrestrial “reasonably assured resources” of uranium, which are likely to amount to 100 to 300 million tons of uranium at a price of $350 per kg (in comparison with the current spot market price of $20-30 per kg)(21).
John P. Holdren and R.K. Pachauri, “Energy”, in ICSU, An Agenda of Science for Environment and Development Into the 21st Century, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 103-118.
Of course, nobody of right mind would buy uranium at $350/kg when the same material is available at $30/kg, but it is of primary importance to note that at $350/kg these high-cost terrestrial resources would still be cheaper than the cost of recycling fuel in an LWR (perhaps $700/kg of natural uranium avoided) or of building a breeder reactor with a capital cost that might be double that of an LWR.

Ultimately, we may have safe, economical breeder reactors, but we can take centuries to perfect them….”
We also large thorium resources can be exploited in existing reactors technology

I hope you’ll forgive my poor English, bye!

It is also important to understand that nuclear power can only at most be a small part of the solution. There isn’t enough economically recoverable U235 to build enough nuclear plants to solve our emissions problem. There are 330GW of coal power plants that need to be replaced in the U.S. alone. If the world adds 700 new reactors to its generating capacity, half would have to be in the U.S. just to replace our coal. Then there is China’s coal, India’s coal, etc. MIT’s The Future of Coal (http://web.mit.edu/coal/) has an expanded nuclear scenario that shows capacity going from 1.95PWh to 7.44PWh in 2050 (Table 2.6), and yet in the same scenario coal use increases. (They also assume end-use efficiency improvements.)

Breeder reactors and spent fuel reprocessing could extend the U235 supply, but when MIT looked at those options, they concluded the once-through fuel cycle still made the most sense. (http://web.mit.edu/nuclearpower/).