'bout damned time.
A pity for them that there are better places to get electricity from.
For a while. Then their tech bases will catch up. In a likely "magical sudden replacement for oil" scenario, their tech bases will *have* to catch up. If the west suddenly stops buying middle eastern oil, even if India and China re willing to buy lots of oil for dirt cheap, there will be some big economies collapsing pretty much overnight. As, say, Saudi Arabia devloves into economic chaos, rest assured that political chaos will soon follow... and in the Middle East, that tends to involve people blowing up their own resources to make some sort of dumbass point. And when that happens, Arabia's future will very quickly vanish.
I'm sure some have.
If you take "nuclear waste" and simply encase it (in metal, concrete, water, whatever), assuming the casing material is the right thickness, the casing will absorb the radiation and convert it into heat. For a lot of waste products (steel pipes, work rags, filters, etc) the heat generated would be pretty minimal, difficult to extract useful electricity from. However, the casing will nevertheless be warmer than it otherwise would have been. Hell, cast giant concrete blocks with nuke-waste cores and use them as the foundations for large facilities in the arctic. Build roads with beds of nuclear waste... automatic de-icing.If the Gorebots are right, then build giant self-heated nuclear walls to help hold back the ice sheets sure to form the moment mankind wisely stops using fossil fuels, the climate changes and the wonderful glaciers start marching down from the poles to cover the Earth.
