Nice editorial. A couple of "opinions";

micro-nuclear is great, and even though it could be used in some locations, I want to see that used in spacecraft. Imagine what could be done if there were 100's of Kilowatts to 10's of Megawatts on a satellite orbiting the outer planets. On the "space industry" side of things, to support the idea of "mining" the moon for Helium 3 (an expensive nuclear fusion fuel), a small reliable power plant on the surface is needed. On the propulsion front, it could be used for an ION drive, an NTP (Nuclear Thermal Propulsion) drive, or one of the many hybrid concepts that have been proposed. Something along these lines is probably needed to make a manned Mars trip / exploration viable.

The CO2 capture is IMHO missing the point, any capture that is done should be turned back into fuel. Carbon is the "low tech" approach to create a storage system for Hydrogen. The technology is available now, and can easily be deployed. The one that I lean towards is making Methanol; there is an industrial process that can work on a large scale, and the alcohol can be used directly in an IC engine, or fed into a fuel cell. Methanol does have some negatives with it, so I don't see it as a cure all, but it could definately be deployed in a closed system.