I know that nuclear can replace traditional fuel in most cases, but what about transportation? Currently, aviation requires jet fuel, which comes from oil reserves that will eventually be depleted. How will post-scarcity transportation look?
In Australia the overnight trains between Melbourne and Sydney as well as Brisbane and Sydney are regularly sold out. Quite literally the only reason more trains haven’t been added to accommodate the demand is due to intense lobbying from airport and airline companies. And this existing demand is for a 12 hour rail journey as opposed to a 90 minute flight.
Funnily enough, the replacement trains the New South Wales government is rolling out has even less capacity than the existing trains, meaning the new services will have less passengers before it gets sold out.
I haven’t even scratched the surface on the Laos fast rail or Chinese high speed rail.
Correct, and you can have high speed rail or very high speed rail (China is trialing maglev low-atmospheric tube trains that could make the Shenzen-Shanghai journey take like 20 minutes or something ludicrous like that), but people were also using Chinese rail before high-speed, and millions still do use “low-speed” rail in China!
All electric too of course.
Speed is only possible in socialism in fact because of diminishing returns, China invests in high speed for the collaterals of why people travel - tourism, business deals, work commute, etc. In capitalism high speed rail is privately owned or only enhances private interests (private companies, private tourist traps etc) so the state loses a lot of money upgrading to HSR because the commutes alone, i.e. what makes them money, don’t cover the cost.
But even without speed there are ways to make train attractive - faster wifi, for example, so people can open the laptop and work or watch youtube during the trip. Then it doesn’t matter to them if it takes 4 hours or 8 (for the most part) as long as they get there. You just plan around it accordingly.
And it’s not even a question - China records 4 billion annual passenger trips on rail versus 640 million for air, accounting for domestic trips only. That’s a 7x difference.
In Europe we used to have overnight trains with a bed in the cabin. Not anymore. Now you have to take the plane to go almost anywhere because there’s no connections, or they’re so complicated it makes no sense to inflict that on yourself (like spending an entire day at the train station waiting for your connecting trip), so people just take the plane. It’s cheaper too.
If humanity hasn’t transitioned to renewable energy before we tap out the last of the oil reserves we will have way bigger problems than not being able to fly air planes. As it is there are 50x a years consumption in proven oil reserves and another 100 years that would cost twice as much to extract as it does today.
Russia’s nuclear powered Cruise missile is a proven concept of Nuclear miniaturization. Maybe the Airplane of the future will be Nuclear. Or maybe there will be high speed rail networks like they have in China. 300km/hr might not be 1000km/hr but if it is electric who cares if it takes 4 days to go half way around the world instead of 20 hrs?
Presumably, communism would have more renewable energy resources (solar and wind energy) in many places, including transportation, so the fuel problem is honestly not a major concern for me.
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