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Originally Posted by Greg700
The technology already exists. It is just inconvenient, too expensive, or not yet polished enough for the general public.
If gas became more expensive than using nuclear power to charge your electric car, would you switch over or just throw up your hands and stop driving? The idea that society will break down simply because oil becomes (more) expensive implies that people will do the later.
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Our way of life exists because of a large supply of cheap, relatively efficient energy. There isn't anything currently available that can take its place, and anything that could would require a whole lot of money and has never been attempted on anything close to the scale required to replace oil. This doesn't even take into account all things that we use oil for that aren't directly related to energy, like plastics.
Using nuclear power to charge my electric car isn't as simple as it sounds. First, you have to build the power plants, something that is essentially impossible right now because of politics. There is no guarantee that there will be money to build them if we wait until oil gets really expensive to do so, or that we will have the political will to do so.
Even so, we will still have to deal with the political problems that will sprout up as oil gets more expensive, like china and the middle east and venezuela.
This whole thing will fundamentally alter the way we live, and i'm not enough of an optimist to think that it will result in anything close to wonderful, at least in the short term.