Martin: Switching cars to electricity is the easy part. All you need to do is swap the fuel tank for batteries and the motor for a… motor. In practice its a little more complicated but most of the hurdles revolve around getting a decent range and fast practical charging methods. Unfortunately the rest of the transportation industry isn’t so easy except trains. Electric trains have been running for years, with their pre-determined rails they can use overhead cables too. As long as those cables are plugged into a nuclear power station then the train is a clean, green, peak-oil proof solution.
Shipping and aviation are where the headaches really begin. Shipping consumes vast amounts of fuel and creates vast amounts of pollution. We depend on shipping for our modern lives, a lot of international trade depends on shipping so we need a solution once the oil runs out. We can’t go back to sails as the wind is too unpredictable and ships have got too big to be carried on sails alone. We can’t go to batteries, imagine how much bigger an oil tanker would have to be if it needed to store 6 weeks worth of electricity on board too. The only solution is for the ships to generate their own power.
Luckily we already have a solution from the military. Nuclear powered warships and submarines have been patrolling the oceans for years. These powerplants are fantastic, they only need refueling every 20 or so years. They are quite compact, as evidenced by their use in submarines and they don’t need fossil fuels. Nuclear power cargo ships have already been built, and I think that should be the way of all large container ships and tankers built in the coming years.
Moving onto aviation, nuclear would solve a lot of problems. But you can’t really strap a reactor to an A380 can you?
Thomas: Probably not, both sides of the cold war tried to make it work, but neither managed to perfect it before the problem was solved with ICBM’s and nuclear power submarines. I don’t see why it couldn’t be made to work, it’s just probably going to be difficult to get past the public perception that everyone living near Chernobyl has an odd number of eyes and green hair. Aeroplanes are going to be jet powered for some time to come, and that means oil or a synthetic alternative to oil (see SwiftFuel).
There is another option, coming in from the left field. Remember the Zeppelin? Well according to one article I was reading, not only would a sprinkling of modern technology make one of these entirely safe but it would also be possible to run it cleanly using small nuclear reactors. This sounds like one of those great idea that will never take off (excuse the pun). We’ve already given up on fast transport in favour of cheap transport once, this could take it to the logical conclusion of cramming 1000 people at a time on to an airship that takes three days to cross the Atlantic! Or even better, as a limousine in the air for the rich and famous. Who wants a pokey little 767 when you can run your empire from something with room for a tennis court on board! I know which I would choose.
Ultimately, air travel seems to be the only area we don’t have a convincing alternative for that doesn’t depend on oil. Maybe I need to make sure I get my sightseeing holidays in now?
Martin: Seems like a great idea to me, even better than a Led Zeppelin! Ultimately though, whilst we can see that this is a clever and fairly safe solution, the mainstream media will not. The likes of the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph would treat this as the ultimate opportunity to spread fear into the narrow minded majority. It would crate a fear storm so great it would dwarf a story about Jeremy Clarkson spreading Swine Flu, causing house prices to fall, leading to an increase in immigration and that those immigrants are the very reason why you will also have a brown recycling bin to go with the others and you are being made to pay for carrier bags at Tesco. Thus the company developing said Nuclear Airship will go bust. The we run out of oil, the planes have to be grounded, house prices and everything else take a bit of a crash, but the immigrants won’t be able to get here anymore.
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