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[Lydia Tishal]

In my opinion, fossil fuels are just to useful to leave alone. We are never going to get to a point where every nation on Earth decides to stop using fossil fuels. Even if the worst climate projections come to pass, it will never happen. The oil producing nations will continue to produce because they have to. They will sell at a price that someone will be willing to pay because they have to.

And that will continue until every source of fossil fuel is gone.

[lallara zhuul]

Put all the radioactive waste to the moon.

Put a base there and call it Moonbase Alpha.

[Julianus Soter]

The math behind this is pretty simple.

No oil = no civilization.

No civilization = mass starvation, war without end, societal collapse.

[Lyn Farel]

Neat.

Yes for uranium (or other radioactive isotopes), this is true, but I do not think that we are close to harvest ores in space yet. Will take quite some time, especially considering the space programs current situation.

I think we have time to become an interplanetary civilization before the Earth's Uranium/Radioactive isotope supply runs out.

I dont know, maybe its conflicting sources. I am merely basing my statement on what my dad (who insures that kind of industries) told me : that we will run out of our main uranium deposits more or less at the same time we will lose all the remaining oil deposits. Will have to check that statement, ofc. *shrugs*

[orange]

Well then, I suppose we do not have any more time to waste.

[Arkady Sadik]

I dont know, maybe its conflicting sources. I am merely basing my statement on what my dad (who insures that kind of industries) told me : that we will run out of our main uranium deposits more or less at the same time we will lose all the remaining oil deposits. Will have to check that statement, ofc. *shrugs*

This was new to me, so I did check (with Wikipedia, the absolutely most accurate and scientifically peer-reviewed yadda yadda source ever):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_depletion lists a number of sources for possible uranium depletion, those being pessimistic at 2040ish (assuming no increase in percentage of nuclear power sources, could be as low as 2013 if this increases *har har*) to 2070ish, and optimistic "we'll likely find better ways to extract it soon" between 2100 and up to 47k years.

As with oil, there is no actual "hard limit" in the strict sense for uranium - the question is how much money you are willing to pay to get it (huge quantities in the ocean, but requires more effort to extract, i.e. over twice the current price).

As for oil, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predicting_the_timing_of_peak_oil lists a number of sources, with pessimistic sources going for 2013-2015 and optimistic ones 2020-2030 (or, if you believe some OPEC spokespeople, "centuries").

There is a difference, though - "peak oil" is not the point of depletion, so you can add a few years to that (using last reserves etc.). Even so, I'd say publically available sources support oil being a problem before uranium, though not by that much.

(Fascinating. I didn't know uranium was a non-renewable resource. Thanks for making me read this stuff :-))

[Kaleigh Doyle]

The loss of oil in current society would require an exponentially massive undertaking to adapt the infrastructure for. Honestly, I wouldn't put it past civilizations to nuke each other first to lower demand for oil rather than make that kind of change. Or at the very least, really try to dominate the middle east and other vast oil centers.

[Mizhara]

I'll bet we can still build longboats and grab some 'shrooms. Come get us, we're ready up here.

[orange]

Thinking about it a bit more; Uranium-235 (0.7% of Earth Uranium) is not the only fission nuclear fuel.  Breeder reactors utilize Uranium-238 (99.3%).  The article (with reference) notes that Breeder reactor fuels is likely to last a lot longer.

The loss of oil in current society would require an exponentially massive undertaking to adapt the infrastructure for. Honestly, I wouldn't put it past civilizations to nuke each other first to lower demand for oil rather than make that kind of change. Or at the very least, really try to dominate the middle east and other vast oil centers.

We must make the decision to make the transition or we will end up fighting more wars over access to those resources.   We are already running into infrastructure concerns.  We managed to not build & develop nuclear technology for decades.  Making the decision to not build more oil/coal/fossil fuel power plants and only having future development and construction be nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, etc will begin the transition.  It is not something we can do overnight;  better to start now and not when we run out of oil/coal/etc.