Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
I agree, especially if you take the possibility of thorium reactors into account. It's much more plausible to suppose that fissiles stop being used because of a quasi-religious prohibition.
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The thing is that the modern economy is a castle of cards; it's a complex system, disturby it too much an it all falls apart.
As we stand, dropping fossil fuels is madness, civilization would soon collapse short after. Fossil fuels arent just fuel and plastic, it's also fertilizers, and modern agriculture is an industrial activity. Current nuclear power is insuficient to replace fossil as we are right now - which has been an extreme short-sight from our divine overlords who dont care about anything except their personal power (that includes the "enlightened" ones at the Club of Rome and similar organizations such as the World Economic Forum who think they know what's best for us better than ourselves).
Without fossil, industries would halt, agriculture would halt, famines would begin, and hungry people is people desperate and people that you dont control.
Civilization collapse could be halted up to WW2 because of the empirial systems, the logistic chains were all internally contained; now pretty much only the USA has that capacity, so if globalization ends China goes into Oblivion, they'll have a famine that will kill 500 millions of people, Brazil breaks down, althought we wouldnt have a famine but we would deindustrialize and go back to the 19th century, Africa and Middle East would go back to the stone age and hundreds of millions would die and Europe would go back to the middle ages also would hundreds of millions of deaths.
Oh, but before that there would be endless wars as countries fight for scraps.
Now, as for the US, they can only survive because they now are self sufficient in oil. Take that away and there's no more industries, no more agriculture.
And the notion of a small group of army personnel under the government keeping a piece of civilization so that it can flourish back again is mostly a fantasy. Ok, lets assume the USA keeps one Nuclear Powerplant under it's thumb in hopes to rebuild after the "Fallout" setting strikes the world. Well, they'll need soldiers and guns to protect what they have from the hordes of hungry nomads. Well, it just so happens that soldiers eat but dont produce food. So you'll need farms, lands and soldiers to protect those. The electricity you'll need for making vehicles to transport the goods, machines to produce the manufacture and the food, and the guns, since all of those need replacement. But in order to make those, you need mines of raw minerals. Sometimes some essentials will be hard to come by - like rubber for the tires. And on top of that, you need skilled people - you need engineers, nuclear physicists, agronomers and more, all people with skills that need years to develop, and in order to do that you need surplus of food, clothes in order for those people to dedicate themselves to study rather than hunting or growing their food. It cannot be done.
And all that without the practicity of plastics - more so to the industry rather than daily life. Bio plastic requires even more specialized knowledge and is far harder to produce than plastic from petroleum, so it's not a viable alternative for a post-economic-apocalipse society.
Without oil, it all ends, and in just a few decades or centuries at best, we are back to the middle ages.