I am not an authority on much anything except how to make a good cup of coffee, but my readings on this tell me this author is wrong. I agree that home-brewed biofuel is not the way to go, but you can keep the rest of this.
1. Nuclear energy is always very strongly opposed and disliked by the general taxpayer. This is not to pass judgment on it one way or the other, just to say it is going to be a very hard selling 500 more nuclear sites in the US.
2. The author claims that biomass sources of biofuel are too diffuse to produce enough energy to supply our fuel needs, and that they are in competition with better uses of the land for things like food, trees, rain forests, livestock, housing etc. but this is not shown to be true and there is strong evidence that it is
not true. For example, camelina, jatropha, switchgrass and algae are sources of biomass for fuel manufacturing and none of them use arable or otherwise useful land. We could even put this sort of fuel source out on the oceans for that matter. We are not short of land for growing biomass plants.
3. I do not think most surface vehicles for short range applications should ultimately run on liquid fuels anyway, no matter how the fuel is made. My readings tell me that some sort of battery technology will arrive fairly soon after which point it will be far better to have electricity than gas or diesel. Even without new batteries, enough electricity for cars and trucks can be made from wind power and other renewable sources. I doubt these "green" sources would cost as much as going totally nuclear. His argument that the cost in terms of retooling of the world's cars and trucks to use electricity is not very good, if you consider they all wear out anyway and have to be replaced. The cost of replacement will be there either way. Why not use that opportunity to go to electric? The cost is a bit prohibitive right now, but with larger volumes of production the costs will go way down.
4. Hydrocarbon fuels can be made from water using other sources than nuclear fission or fusion. The Navy is experimenting with seawater for example, here is a news story from my thread
Future 737.
5. He says solar energy is diffuse and it is, but not too diffuse. There are many types of mature solar technologies available and it is possible to gather it up. Wind farms, solar arrays, geothermal systems, on and on, and these systems can even be located in or on the oceans. No doubt it will require a large number of transmission lines to gather enough for most of our energy needs, but the advantage of solar is the immense, unlimited, and renewable nature of the energy. There is no greater source of energy available on the planet and as the author says, solar is a direct byproduct of nuclear fission in the Sun. He seems to be making the argument that going directly to nuclear is somehow more efficient, but the argument has no substance because solar energy is already abundantly supplied and can be easily changed into a usable form (electricity).
6. If you take a side in the anthropomorphic-global warming debate (and like the author, I do not), then making more hydrocarbon fuels like gasoline is not a very good idea. He goes on to say that making it out of the CO in the normal atmosphere is a way to do it without adding any from coal or other traditional sources. The idea according to the global warming crowd is we need to remove all the surplus carbon dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere, not leave it there cycling around even if the cycle is a zero-sum-gain equation. He needs to make more convincing the argument that enough CO can be extracted from ordinary air to make fuel via nuclear fission without tilting the proper atmospheric balance. He would have to show that nuclear-derived fuels can be made with a very small amount of the normal quantity of CO in the atmosphere, and that taking it out to make liquid fuels would not upset that balance.
It's an interesting article, but not very convincing.