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Compared to regular oil? Probably. The supply chain is much shorter and you don't have to blow the tops off mountains to get at it. You just have to call up a local fast-food joint and ask if you can have some of their spent cooking oil.
Firstly, I don't believe it would even work without destroying an engine. I'm open to counterarguement. Assuredly since it is such a cheap and easy alternative to gasoline, you've already made the change yourself, right? Care to elaborate on the process?
It works. It isn't a replacement for gasoline. It's a replacement for diesel.
It's a replacement for a handful of diesel engines. Maybe one or two per small town and a couple dozen in cities. Not, however, for the several hundred million personal automobiles that are zipping about. Meaning that it isn't a viable, profitable alternative to petroleum that the evil oil conglomerates are stifling with their patent choking hands.
Compared to regular oil? Probably. The supply chain is much shorter and you don't have to blow the tops off mountains to get at it. You just have to call up a local fast-food joint and ask if you can have some of their spent cooking oil.
Firstly, I don't believe it would even work without destroying an engine. I'm open to counterarguement. Assuredly since it is such a cheap and easy alternative to gasoline, you've already made the change yourself, right? Care to elaborate on the process?
It works. It isn't a replacement for gasoline. It's a replacement for diesel.
It's a replacement for a handful of diesel engines. Maybe one or two per small town and a couple dozen in cities. Not, however, for the several hundred million personal automobiles that are zipping about. Meaning that it isn't a viable, profitable alternative to petroleum that the evil oil conglomerates are stifling with their patent choking hands.
That's why I think it's both pompous and intellectually disingenuous for those jackasses on the evening news to run around in their overalls saying, "it smells like french fries" acting like it's a miracle. It's not. It also ignores the entire economic path that was taken for the waste oil to be created. Businesses are giving away the cooking oil because they don't realize they could be charging for it. Once enough people start asking for it, you can count on paying for it.
I certainly don't think biofuels are a viable alternative for everyone. Electric, currently, is the way to go, and progress is being made with hydrogen. But on an individual basis, if you have a diesel car, DIY biodiesel is definitely something to look into.
I certainly don't think biofuels are a viable alternative for everyone. Electric, currently, is the way to go, and progress is being made with hydrogen. But on an individual basis, if you have a diesel car, DIY biodiesel is definitely something to look into.
Electric cars aren't viable alternatives due to existent battery technology not capable of holding enough of a charge for a long haul and/or able to be recharged in a relatively quick manner. Competitive with filling up 10 gallons of gas or thereabouts. Hydrogen has its own problems, not the least of which being the complete lack of infrastructure producing a chicken-egg problem. And that's pretending that we can get hydrogen economically from not natural gas.
I find this mentality, which is essentially blind faith that some day the oil companies will stop selling a highly profitable resource to people who are more than happy to guzzle it down, highly disturbing. We have profitable, viable alternatives and have done for some time.
I certainly don't think biofuels are a viable alternative for everyone. Electric, currently, is the way to go, and progress is being made with hydrogen. But on an individual basis, if you have a diesel car, DIY biodiesel is definitely something to look into.
You've still generate the electricity somewhere... Oil power plants!
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KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
I certainly don't think biofuels are a viable alternative for everyone. Electric, currently, is the way to go, and progress is being made with hydrogen. But on an individual basis, if you have a diesel car, DIY biodiesel is definitely something to look into.
You've still generate the electricity somewhere... Oil power plants!
Fission.
Or, you know, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hydro, basically anything that doesn't involve burning dead plants.
I certainly don't think biofuels are a viable alternative for everyone. Electric, currently, is the way to go, and progress is being made with hydrogen. But on an individual basis, if you have a diesel car, DIY biodiesel is definitely something to look into.
You've still generate the electricity somewhere... Oil power plants!
Fission.
Or, you know, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hydro, basically anything that doesn't involve burning dead plants.
There's not a great deal of uranium left to be mined, and what is left tends to be in rather low-grade ores. That can be overcome with better nuclear tech, if anyone bothers to invest in it.
The rest, yes I agree. I'd imagine the UK (being a nice island example) could happily generate all its electricity from waves and tidal power.
Geothermal would be awesome, and not just because it was in TA.
We have enough nuclear fuel to last us well over 3 centuries. And that's even with assuming that every Chinese and Indian kid gets a Wii, 50 inch plasma, and an electric powered whirlygig that flails about needlessly. Hell, we have enough 'spent' nuclear rods to cut back on many coal plants (which is the vast majority of our power supply, Oil only accounts for 1/4-1/3rd) if we'd just build some damn breeder reactors.
That isn't the issue, though. Nor is nuclear a panacea for our energy needs, simply a stopgap. A very long and safe stopgap, but still. Particularly when it comes to personal transport. Which is where the oil barons are alledgedly sitting on a throne composed of the skulls of inventors, and their patents for cars that run on water and happiness.
A lot of problems will be solved when building windows are solar panels. Is 20 years too optimistic an estimate?
BIPV's are around right now, they just aren't economically feasible (take 20 years to pay down the initial investment, and by then you'd have been able to get a better solar cell for less cost) and get shit for energy efficiency. Same thing with the flexible photovoltaics that are pretty new. Things should improve when they get off of silicon, thanks Germany, but it's still a long ways off before direct solar is going to be doing any heavy lifting beyond hot water systems. Which should be used everywhere, and not just Greece.
Here's the thing, though. You don't need to be using active solar measures to have buildings take advantage of the sun. Passive solar heating, daylighting, etc. are free and generally improve your standard of living. Same goes with natural ventilation re: stack or cross which should also be omnipresent, but designers in the 50's and 60's were dicks and we lost generations of knowledge because energy was cheap. (Why make an insulated vestibule when you could just have a heater blowing 24 hours a day!) If we were to go back to vernacular design, the original 'off the grid' homes, we'd cut down on our emissions and energy usage tremendously. The built environment accounts for nearly half of all pollution, afterall.
A Potential replacement in terms of transportability. Energy from burning salt water. This is some crazy stuff. In an attempt to discover a cure for cancer a guy was able to find out that with radio waves passing through salt water you can cause it to burn at 1500 degrees centigrade. In the video they also give a demonstration on how it can power a vehicle. This seems like this is the best way to go, considering everywhere you go you can get salt water.
Edit: Yes I kind of figured that you would need energy to power the radio waves, but in terms of a transportable energy supply equivilent of oil. I suppose I don't know the numbers that went into getting the reaction to occur, nor the energy wasted on it.
Yes I sort of figured that you would require energy to cause the reaction I just wasn't aware of how much energy would be needed to cause it, and I must admit I was rather swept up in how exciting the prospect was and logic didn't really kick in until after the post. I did fix the post to reflect that, but I thought the exciting prospect was that salt water is more readily available than hydrogen and easier to store.
Yes I sort of figured that you would require energy to cause the reaction I just wasn't aware of how much energy would be needed to cause it, and I must admit I was rather swept up in how exciting the prospect was and logic didn't really kick in until after the post. I did fix the post to reflect that, but I thought the exciting prospect was that salt water is more readily available than hydrogen and easier to store.
How is salt water stored energy if it requires you to power up a radio emitter to tap into that 'energy' it holds? This is a perpetual motion machine run on stupid.
That isn't the issue, though. Nor is nuclear a panacea for our energy needs, simply a stopgap. A very long and safe stopgap, but still. Particularly when it comes to personal transport. Which is where the oil barons are alledgedly sitting on a throne composed of the skulls of inventors, and their patents for cars that run on water and happiness.
Honestly, I wouldn't call that a stopgap. One century isn't a stopgap, let alone three. Hell, electricity being harnessed at all has barely been around a century.
Another hundred years and we're probably going to be melting off the molecules of metal on our cars to power them, cold fusion style.
We have enough nuclear fuel to last us well over 3 centuries*
* at 'current rates of consumption'.
Fixed.
When someone says 'we have x years left of [insert non-reneweable resource here] I get nervous.
We have hundreds of years of oil left.
It's just a shame that most if it is poor quality, or in places that would not be economical to extract it from.
The same applies to any other resource - you hit a point of diminishing returns and prices begin to rise significantly. Historically the answer has been to switch to another resource, which is great when there is a 'better' alternative (wood > coal > oil).
When there is no better alternative, or we only start looking *after* we identify the problem (markets are generally reactive) you have a problem. Particularly when the transition time is decades long.
We have enough nuclear fuel to last us well over 3 centuries*
* at 'current rates of consumption'.
Fixed.
No. In fact I addressed that in the post you quoted. We have enough nuclear fuel to last us well over 3 centuries. And that's even with assuming that every Chinese and Indian kid gets a Wii, 50 inch plasma, and an electric powered whirlygig that flails about needlessly. We have enough nuclear fuel to support 9 billion people living to a standard representative of the worst contemporary excesses of the world. Which isn't going to be the case.
The only reason that nuclear isn't anything more than a stopgap is simply because centralized massive plants with miles of transmission lines isn't very efficient. Particularly when compared to solar cells on your roof and 30' of copper. Photovoltaics are the future. That future just isn't going to begin to start for another 30 years or so.
Uh, no, we have enough nuclear fuel to last us over 3 centuries if we run the entire world on nuclear energy. Actually let's be clear - estimates generally start at 300 years and boom out to somewhere between 5000 -> 2 million years depending how hard we go with breeder reactors.
And whether or not (or rather, how soon) we can figure out how to get energy from thorium efficiently.
It's just a shame that most if it is poor quality, or in places that would not be economical to extract it from.
Not economical now. Thirty years ago, people would have thought you were insane if you told them you could get oil at and around the edge of the West African continental shelf. Now deep water directional drilling is almost routine.
That isn't the issue, though. Nor is nuclear a panacea for our energy needs, simply a stopgap. A very long and safe stopgap, but still. Particularly when it comes to personal transport. Which is where the oil barons are alledgedly sitting on a throne composed of the skulls of inventors, and their patents for cars that run on water and happiness.
Have you heard the story of John Diesel? Apparently he died under mysterious circumstances. Most of those silly tinfoil urban myths are based on that.
A fungus responsible for the rapid deterioration of military clothing and canvas tents during the Second World War could significantly improve the production of biofuels, say U.S. scientists.
Once the bane of soldiers fighting in the South Pacific, Tricoderma reesei is a hungry fungus that quickly digests plant fibres into simple sugars.
In a paper published Monday in Nature Biotechnology, researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute say the fungus's genetic sequence gives important clues about how it breaks down plant fibres.
The finding could lead to processes that more efficiently and cost effectively convert corn, switchgrass and even cellulose-based municipal waste into ethanol. Ethanol from waste products can be a more carbon-neutral alternative to gasoline.
However, there is an ongoing global debate over fuel and food production. Groups like the Sierra Club of Canada point out that while more ethanol and less gasoline makes sense, it has to be the right kind of ethanol. The environmental group says it takes five hectares of cornfields to produce enough ethanol to run a car for a year. The same land could feed seven people for a year.
The Sierra Club of Canada has urged government to switch from relying on ethanol derived from corn and grains to ethanol produced from waste straw and wood chips. It argues that producing ethanol from those sources doesn't take farmland out of food production and achieves greater reductions in the emission of greenhouse gases.
Meanwhile, the Los Alamos researchers and their colleagues say they decoded the genetic sequence of T. reesei in an attempt to discover why the deep green fungus was so good at digesting plant cells. The scientists say it could be used to secrete enzymes that can be purified and added into a watery mixture of cellulose pulp and other materials to produce sugar. The sugar can then be fermented by yeast to produce ethanol.
"Using this information, it may be possible to improve both of these properties, decreasing the cost of converting cellulosic biomass to fuels and chemicals," Joel Cherry, director of research activities in second-generation biofuels for biotech company Novozymes, said in a release. Denmark-based Novozymes is a collaborating institution in the study.
So this seems interesting in being able to convert alot of the organic waste such as chaff / stalks etc into sugar and in turn turn that into Biofuels.
Anyone more up to date on these things know how much of an increase in effeciency something like this represents?
It's just a shame that most if it is poor quality, or in places that would not be economical to extract it from.
Not economical now. Thirty years ago, people would have thought you were insane if you told them you could get oil at and around the edge of the West African continental shelf. Now deep water directional drilling is almost routine.
... and oil is $120 a barrel and rising. Do you see the link?
When you are going to more and more extreme lengths to get it, the price goes up. It will then reach a point where you start searching for alternatives.
The problem is that implementing alternatives on the scale required to prevent significant economic disruption takes time. It's a generational change, and we don't likely have that sort of time left.
The original poster is probably wrong - it's not the end of the world. But it is going to be unpleasant, particularly for those countries that cannot afford $120 oil, never mind $200 +.
... and oil is $120 a barrel and rising. Do you see the link?
$120 a barrel is due to the falling dollar and commodity trade, not because of actual supply and demand. It isn't safe to invest in the dollar, so instead people invest into commodities because they (certain commodities) are relatively stable in price and even grow in value as time goes by. People see our government throwing money into a hole in Iraq and not reinvesting in production and infrastructure in the country, and they choose not to invest into the country themselves either. Instead, they buy oil commodities. This is no different than when people put their money into gold when the dollar was doing poorly in years past.
Yes, the cost per barrel is increasing due to supply and demand. But most of the price increase is more due to failing trust in the US Dollar than traditional economic pressures.
We have enough nuclear fuel to last us well over 3 centuries*
* at 'current rates of consumption'.
Fixed.
No. In fact I addressed that in the post you quoted. We have enough nuclear fuel to last us well over 3 centuries. And that's even with assuming that every Chinese and Indian kid gets a Wii, 50 inch plasma, and an electric powered whirlygig that flails about needlessly. We have enough nuclear fuel to support 9 billion people living to a standard representative of the worst contemporary excesses of the world. Which isn't going to be the case.
The only reason that nuclear isn't anything more than a stopgap is simply because centralized massive plants with miles of transmission lines isn't very efficient. Particularly when compared to solar cells on your roof and 30' of copper. Photovoltaics are the future. That future just isn't going to begin to start for another 30 years or so.
Interesting. I'll admit I don't know as much about uranium as I do about oil. Where are you getting your figures from?
"The ultimate supply of uranium is believed to be very large and sufficient for at least the next 85 years although some studies indicate underinvestment in the late twentieth century may produce supply problems in the 21st century."
Note that underinvestment is also one of the reasons for plateauing oil production now. Of course, if you investing appropriately means you are using your resource base even faster...
It also talks about the different grades of resources:
"It is estimated that 4.7 million tonnes of uranium ore reserves are economically viable, while 35 million tonnes are classed as mineral resources (reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction).[34] An additional 4.6 billion tonnes of uranium are estimated to be in sea water (Japanese scientists in the 1980s showed that extraction of uranium from sea water using ion exchangers was feasible)."
So 4.7 million tonnes viable, 35 million 'maybe', 4.6 billion tonnes 'technically feasible' (which says nothing about it making economic sense).
Additionally, don't mistake reserves with production rates. How much you have in the ground says nothing about how fast you can get it out. The constant recitation of 'we have hundreds of years of oil left' is one of the reasons we have a problem now.
Once you factor in the low-grade uranium, as well as that which will never be produced as it is not commercially viable or in geopolitically unstable locations, hoarding behaviour by countries when supply gets tight (which is happening with oil producers now), and assume a consumption growth rate of 2% a year, and that 'hundreds of years of supply' will drop real fast.
Finally, given the roll-out time required for significant expansion of nuclear (opposition from a lot of the population, time to construct the plants etc), solar is a much more reasonable solution. The only problem is that darn 30 year transition you mention...
... and oil is $120 a barrel and rising. Do you see the link?
$120 a barrel is due to the falling dollar and commodity trade, not because of actual supply and demand. It isn't safe to invest in the dollar, so instead people invest into commodities because they (certain commodities) are relatively stable in price and even grow in value as time goes by. People see our government throwing money into a hole in Iraq and not reinvesting in production and infrastructure in the country, and they choose not to invest into the country themselves either. Instead, they buy oil commodities. This is no different than when people put their money into gold when the dollar was doing poorly in years past.
Yes, the cost per barrel is increasing due to supply and demand. But most of the price increase is more due to failing trust in the US Dollar than traditional economic pressures.
The falling US dollar is certainly a factor (maybe 30% or so?), however it is important to note that it has risen against other currencies as well.
World production has been basically flat for the past few years, at a time when demand is continuing to rise and traditional economics says we should be expanding production because of the high prices.
What production is coming online is mostly being offset by declines in major existing fields (Cantarell, the North Sea, now Russia as well) and Saudi Arabia's king announced they were going to voluntarily cap their production rate.
This is being caused by a number of factors - geopolitical, production problems, declining US dollar, 'hedge funds' (I've see it argued this is a furphy, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to try and explain it myself). It's a mistake to try an point at one as being 'the reason'.
And of course, oil != electrical supply. Electricity is run by coal, by and large (actually a lot of existing nuclear that no one remembers has been totally safe for the past 20 years as well). Switching to nuclear is favorable because it's carbon neutral and means we can happily use energy intensive processes to make transportation fuel without polluting the environment.
Oil on the other hand is generally strictly the source of modern mobility - with the exception of ships of the navy (nuclear powered) - going anywhere requires oil to power your transportation currently. This is an issue when it gets expensive.
I'll have to do a lot more research on uranium mining and reserves to comment further, so I'll concede on that front for the moment.
Going nuclear presents a couple of problems:
1) Public opposition. Four main issues here: Firstly, the perception that nuclear is unsafe. NIMBYism rules here - nobody wants a reactor anywhere near them. Coal power stations are being stalled all over the place through legal challenges, I can only imagine nuclear would be worse. Chernobyl still looms large in peoples memories.
The other issue, which you note, is that nuclear is fine for electricity generation but does nothing to solve a liquid fuel problem. I think electric cars are ultimately the way to go, but there are still technical hurdles to overcome (http://www.designnews.com/article/CA6551284.html) and, again, time is needed for it to scale up commercially.
If we don't start the transition until after there is a serious problem (i.e. not just continually blaming price rises on speculators/Hedge funds/OPEC), there is a much greater risk of economic disruption.
Posts
It's a replacement for a handful of diesel engines. Maybe one or two per small town and a couple dozen in cities. Not, however, for the several hundred million personal automobiles that are zipping about. Meaning that it isn't a viable, profitable alternative to petroleum that the evil oil conglomerates are stifling with their patent choking hands.
Electric cars aren't viable alternatives due to existent battery technology not capable of holding enough of a charge for a long haul and/or able to be recharged in a relatively quick manner. Competitive with filling up 10 gallons of gas or thereabouts. Hydrogen has its own problems, not the least of which being the complete lack of infrastructure producing a chicken-egg problem. And that's pretending that we can get hydrogen economically from not natural gas.
So...
You've still generate the electricity somewhere... Oil power plants!
Or, you know, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, hydro, basically anything that doesn't involve burning dead plants.
There's not a great deal of uranium left to be mined, and what is left tends to be in rather low-grade ores. That can be overcome with better nuclear tech, if anyone bothers to invest in it.
The rest, yes I agree. I'd imagine the UK (being a nice island example) could happily generate all its electricity from waves and tidal power.
Geothermal would be awesome, and not just because it was in TA.
That isn't the issue, though. Nor is nuclear a panacea for our energy needs, simply a stopgap. A very long and safe stopgap, but still. Particularly when it comes to personal transport. Which is where the oil barons are alledgedly sitting on a throne composed of the skulls of inventors, and their patents for cars that run on water and happiness.
BIPV's are around right now, they just aren't economically feasible (take 20 years to pay down the initial investment, and by then you'd have been able to get a better solar cell for less cost) and get shit for energy efficiency. Same thing with the flexible photovoltaics that are pretty new. Things should improve when they get off of silicon, thanks Germany, but it's still a long ways off before direct solar is going to be doing any heavy lifting beyond hot water systems. Which should be used everywhere, and not just Greece.
Here's the thing, though. You don't need to be using active solar measures to have buildings take advantage of the sun. Passive solar heating, daylighting, etc. are free and generally improve your standard of living. Same goes with natural ventilation re: stack or cross which should also be omnipresent, but designers in the 50's and 60's were dicks and we lost generations of knowledge because energy was cheap. (Why make an insulated vestibule when you could just have a heater blowing 24 hours a day!) If we were to go back to vernacular design, the original 'off the grid' homes, we'd cut down on our emissions and energy usage tremendously. The built environment accounts for nearly half of all pollution, afterall.
Energy from burning salt water. This is some crazy stuff. In an attempt to discover a cure for cancer a guy was able to find out that with radio waves passing through salt water you can cause it to burn at 1500 degrees centigrade. In the video they also give a demonstration on how it can power a vehicle. This seems like this is the best way to go, considering everywhere you go you can get salt water.
Edit: Yes I kind of figured that you would need energy to power the radio waves, but in terms of a transportable energy supply equivilent of oil. I suppose I don't know the numbers that went into getting the reaction to occur, nor the energy wasted on it.
And didn't we all conclude it was dumb back then, too?
How is salt water stored energy if it requires you to power up a radio emitter to tap into that 'energy' it holds? This is a perpetual motion machine run on stupid.
Honestly, I wouldn't call that a stopgap. One century isn't a stopgap, let alone three. Hell, electricity being harnessed at all has barely been around a century.
Another hundred years and we're probably going to be melting off the molecules of metal on our cars to power them, cold fusion style.
Fixed.
When someone says 'we have x years left of [insert non-reneweable resource here] I get nervous.
We have hundreds of years of oil left.
It's just a shame that most if it is poor quality, or in places that would not be economical to extract it from.
The same applies to any other resource - you hit a point of diminishing returns and prices begin to rise significantly. Historically the answer has been to switch to another resource, which is great when there is a 'better' alternative (wood > coal > oil).
When there is no better alternative, or we only start looking *after* we identify the problem (markets are generally reactive) you have a problem. Particularly when the transition time is decades long.
No. In fact I addressed that in the post you quoted. We have enough nuclear fuel to last us well over 3 centuries. And that's even with assuming that every Chinese and Indian kid gets a Wii, 50 inch plasma, and an electric powered whirlygig that flails about needlessly. We have enough nuclear fuel to support 9 billion people living to a standard representative of the worst contemporary excesses of the world. Which isn't going to be the case.
The only reason that nuclear isn't anything more than a stopgap is simply because centralized massive plants with miles of transmission lines isn't very efficient. Particularly when compared to solar cells on your roof and 30' of copper. Photovoltaics are the future. That future just isn't going to begin to start for another 30 years or so.
And whether or not (or rather, how soon) we can figure out how to get energy from thorium efficiently.
So this seems interesting in being able to convert alot of the organic waste such as chaff / stalks etc into sugar and in turn turn that into Biofuels.
Anyone more up to date on these things know how much of an increase in effeciency something like this represents?
MWO: Adamski
BRAWL: 1160-9686-9416
Think of the clowns.
They can use hydrogen. Hydrogen has never gone wrong in balloons, right?
... and oil is $120 a barrel and rising. Do you see the link?
When you are going to more and more extreme lengths to get it, the price goes up. It will then reach a point where you start searching for alternatives.
The problem is that implementing alternatives on the scale required to prevent significant economic disruption takes time. It's a generational change, and we don't likely have that sort of time left.
The original poster is probably wrong - it's not the end of the world. But it is going to be unpleasant, particularly for those countries that cannot afford $120 oil, never mind $200 +.
$120 a barrel is due to the falling dollar and commodity trade, not because of actual supply and demand. It isn't safe to invest in the dollar, so instead people invest into commodities because they (certain commodities) are relatively stable in price and even grow in value as time goes by. People see our government throwing money into a hole in Iraq and not reinvesting in production and infrastructure in the country, and they choose not to invest into the country themselves either. Instead, they buy oil commodities. This is no different than when people put their money into gold when the dollar was doing poorly in years past.
Yes, the cost per barrel is increasing due to supply and demand. But most of the price increase is more due to failing trust in the US Dollar than traditional economic pressures.
Interesting. I'll admit I don't know as much about uranium as I do about oil. Where are you getting your figures from?
Wikipedia seems to think there is significantly less: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Resources_and_reserves
"The ultimate supply of uranium is believed to be very large and sufficient for at least the next 85 years although some studies indicate underinvestment in the late twentieth century may produce supply problems in the 21st century."
Note that underinvestment is also one of the reasons for plateauing oil production now. Of course, if you investing appropriately means you are using your resource base even faster...
It also talks about the different grades of resources:
"It is estimated that 4.7 million tonnes of uranium ore reserves are economically viable, while 35 million tonnes are classed as mineral resources (reasonable prospects for eventual economic extraction).[34] An additional 4.6 billion tonnes of uranium are estimated to be in sea water (Japanese scientists in the 1980s showed that extraction of uranium from sea water using ion exchangers was feasible)."
So 4.7 million tonnes viable, 35 million 'maybe', 4.6 billion tonnes 'technically feasible' (which says nothing about it making economic sense).
Additionally, don't mistake reserves with production rates. How much you have in the ground says nothing about how fast you can get it out. The constant recitation of 'we have hundreds of years of oil left' is one of the reasons we have a problem now.
Once you factor in the low-grade uranium, as well as that which will never be produced as it is not commercially viable or in geopolitically unstable locations, hoarding behaviour by countries when supply gets tight (which is happening with oil producers now), and assume a consumption growth rate of 2% a year, and that 'hundreds of years of supply' will drop real fast.
Finally, given the roll-out time required for significant expansion of nuclear (opposition from a lot of the population, time to construct the plants etc), solar is a much more reasonable solution. The only problem is that darn 30 year transition you mention...
The falling US dollar is certainly a factor (maybe 30% or so?), however it is important to note that it has risen against other currencies as well.
Here's another reason: http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/3875
World production has been basically flat for the past few years, at a time when demand is continuing to rise and traditional economics says we should be expanding production because of the high prices.
What production is coming online is mostly being offset by declines in major existing fields (Cantarell, the North Sea, now Russia as well) and Saudi Arabia's king announced they were going to voluntarily cap their production rate.
This is being caused by a number of factors - geopolitical, production problems, declining US dollar, 'hedge funds' (I've see it argued this is a furphy, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to try and explain it myself). It's a mistake to try an point at one as being 'the reason'.
I'll have to do a lot more research on uranium mining and reserves to comment further, so I'll concede on that front for the moment.
Going nuclear presents a couple of problems:
1) Public opposition. Four main issues here: Firstly, the perception that nuclear is unsafe. NIMBYism rules here - nobody wants a reactor anywhere near them. Coal power stations are being stalled all over the place through legal challenges, I can only imagine nuclear would be worse. Chernobyl still looms large in peoples memories.
Secondly, expense (subsidies and capital costs): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants#Capital_costs. It's worth noting that fossil fuels are also significantly subsidized, depending on how you count the inputs.
Thirdly, waste disposal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants#Waste_disposal. I don't know what it's like in the states, but the opposition to waste dumps is ferocious in Australia.
Fourthly, the insurance nuclear power companies pay to cover potential accidents would be dwarfed by the actual cost of the clean up of a serious accident (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_new_nuclear_power_plants#Insurance).
2) Time to deployment - generally seems to be at least 10 years. The UK 'hopes' to have new ones running by 2020 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_plant#Future_of_the_industry).
The other issue, which you note, is that nuclear is fine for electricity generation but does nothing to solve a liquid fuel problem. I think electric cars are ultimately the way to go, but there are still technical hurdles to overcome (http://www.designnews.com/article/CA6551284.html) and, again, time is needed for it to scale up commercially.
If we don't start the transition until after there is a serious problem (i.e. not just continually blaming price rises on speculators/Hedge funds/OPEC), there is a much greater risk of economic disruption.