If mandatory fuel recycling would become a thing nuclear would be a very viable option. As for existing oil deposits, there are still substantial reserves the problem with them is that they are either incredibly hard to refine like shale oil or they are buried twice or more deep than the deposits we currently exploit.

Downside: has never been successfully make to produce power. Doesn't seem likely to any time soon. When it comes to transportation is probably net-zero algae or plant derived fuels, like Boeing is working on. Green hydrocarbons are pretty much the only safe option for air travel at least, until batteries have a much greater energy density fossil fuels. It's probably similar for shipping, but I've seen some weird options there, like a return of sails or solar ships.

Trappedinwikipedia wrote:

Downside: has never been successfully make to produce power. Doesn't seem likely to any time soon. When it comes to transportation is probably net-zero algae or plant derived fuels, like Boeing is working on. Green hydrocarbons are pretty much the only safe option for air travel at least, until batteries have a much greater energy density fossil fuels. It's probably similar for shipping, but I've seen some weird options there, like a return of sails or solar ships.

Fusion is probably a few years away, sure, but it's well within the whole doomsday timeline. Even if there's no magical breakthrough, there are already functioning near-break even fusion devices, and small efficiency improvements can lead to break-even or productive fusion. We'll probably have a working fusion reactor by 2020, although commercial adoption may wait until a while after that because it might not be cost-effective by then.

I mean, even if we get fusion soon, it's not going to make a huge difference; the price of electricity won't go down until there's significant adoption of it (since it is essentially free energy), and there's a lot of things we don't rely on electricity for: my house still has a direct gas line, for instance, for utilities. This is the 21st century: I want my flying car and electric water heater, but nooooo.

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. (Technically all modern, successful governments arr republics but I won't let that get in the way of a good Churchill quote) It is disappointing how quick some people are to assume autocracy would solve their problems. Because clearly the dictator would have all the same opinions you do, and of course all of those opinions are correct. What could go wrong? Like I said earlier (though it might have been in the other thread), nuclear doesn't have to last forever. It just has to last until the alternatives are ready to take its place. Though in the more likely scenario where we continue to neglect it due to widespread irrational fear, the alternatives are developing quickly enough that the consequences will likely amount to mild discomfort. On the civilizational scale it will be more like a speed bump than a wreck. Also plutonium can easily be used as fuel, where did you get the idea that it can't? Pretty much anything active enough that it gets hot when you have a lot of it can be used as fuel, since all we're really doing is boiling water. As far as proliferation goes, the US, EU, Russia, China, India, Japan, Canada, and Australia already have either nukes or the ability to make them. That's over half the world's population right there and probably 90% of its energy use. Some countries on that list we may not trust with their nukes so much, but that genie is already out of the bottle. The middle-eastern and African countries that we don't want to have nukes can just keep using conventional power, they don't use enough to matter. They can adopt solar sooner than us anyway because they live in some of the sunniest places on Earth. Really the second-biggest drawback to nuclear, besides fear, is we might have already dragged our feet too long and basically committed to making this transistion the hard way. We can push through without nuclear too, it'll just be a lot more painful. By the way if there's a character limit I haven't hit it (and you've probably noticed I tend to ramble, sorry about that), so you can put everything in one post.

Not all fusion is cold fusion. Traditional fusion is much more promising, and won't take nearly 50 years. Cold fusion may actually be a myth, for all we know.

Solar power facilities (the Fallout Helios-One kind [which do exist], not solar panel based ones) can kill birds, though why is not entirely clear. That's not necessarily a real concern; they don't do this over a particularly large area and there's some doubt about the real amount of kills that are due to the solar, and deaths due to other factors (though birds getting lost or trapped in solar facilities might happen due to the enormity of them; the use of land is a concern regarding ecosystem loss, which is generally a concern for people who like biodiversity). Admittedly, the number of birds killed this way pales in comparison to the birds killed by, say, well-cleaned windows or cats, but it's something that limits the usefulness of one of the more potent types of solar power facilities.