Your book took place in 1989, and is very dated. By 1994 the design for a good safe waste using Gen IV nuclear reactor had been made. Look in the book "Storms of My Grandchildren" for more about what happened because of anti-any-nuclear stupidity.
While using farm and landfill generated methane where it is cost effective is better than the 12-15 year effect of 23 times the warming of CO2. The main thing is human emissions must go down enough(80-90%) to prevent tundra then oceanic methane turnover, which is time limited(~2020). The rate of warming is 10 x PETM right now.
http://www.wunderground.com/climate/PETM.aspYou must have had way to many copies of your book made and annually SPAM to try to sell them.
Too bad, nuclear isn't the boogeyman anymore, and burning cow methane if it could be done completely is only reducing the emissions less than the 3% that makes up methane from humans HGHGs. It is far more important to stop the tundra methane self release from happening, because there is 2 1/2 times the carbon there, and would lead to oceanic warming and the equal or more releases from there.
Coal is 40% of the emissions, and oil is 30%, while slash and burn farming is 27% and agricultural methane is 3%. Fossil fuels are the biggest "boogey man". Overpopulation is also a huge "boogey man", and drives emissions up.