151–160 of 261 posts
Oh god, another Erlich/Simons bet is needed: what's low is the level of rare earth exploration and exploitation not absolute supply. Is there a supply chain problem? Yes. Are we approaching a mad-max hell war for the last vestiges of humanities wonder mineral? Alas.. no. The ten years meme is based in a false premise. The article even says Australian known sources are only utilised at 14% and yet predicts a long term…
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Australia is not utilising only 14% of their resources, they have only 14% of the known world resources. More than 50% is based on Congo were the work is performed in miserable conditions. We are all happy that we still don’t reach peak oil, but if we don’t change the way we think about progress and economic growth, in a world with finite resources will have severe consequences.
Unlike petroleum, batteries are almost 100% recyclable. Our "peak battery" is bounded at the product of "peak population" and per-capita battery need, both of which are fairly constrained. Not really the right analysis.
Not using current technology. You can't recycle lithium (for example) using smelting. It's also not very profitable.
It's still very much an unsolved problem.
I would love to be proved wrong!
Edit: I don't know why this is being downvoted. Using current recycling methods, the lithium is not recyclable (the cobalt is). I then asked if I am not correct, to please correct me.
So if not recycled, what's currently happening to lithium batteries in all our electronics and car batteries (etc)? Is it just handled as hazardous waste?
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>Of course if you are reading this you probably trade in your car much sooner, and send it on down the line to poorer and poorer people, eventually the car ends up in Mexico/Central America (US/Canada), or Africa (Europe), where they keep it running until it is ~20 years old and the body fails. Which is why the brands of cars less wealthy people buy are over-represented in the 15-25yo age group on US roads compared t…
Is Honda a luxury brand? There are fewer of them sold than Hyundais (I'm not sure that was the case in 2000), but perhaps not because only wealthy people buy them?
There's plenty of CRVs and SantaFes on the road but the present market share of the 2002 SantaFe has increased relative to the market share of 2002 CRVs when compared to what the situation was in 2005 or so.
We're obviously talking at a statistical, not individual level here. Of course not only wealthy people buy Hondas, just more wealthy people buy Hondas than Kias and wealthy people are more likely to trade in their old car at a dealer which makes it more likely to wind up overseas (if it's got too many miles to easily resell in the US).
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As someone currently dealing the consequences of being far too cavalier with long term environmental pollutants like PCBs and lead, I would argue that behavior you're describing as being that of a "3 year old" is actually a good example of government sanity, not stupidity. It's reasonable long term caution to avoid creating a bigger problem in the future. The true 3 year old behavior on display here is the market beh…
>Land is one of the single most limited resources we have. It sounds romantic but is it really ? Even agricultural land is relatively cheap and there are more scarce resources that are needed for development.
Water and soil in particular are very important resources to protect, far beyond their price in economic terms. They are vital strategic assets because so much of our economy and ecology depend on them.
Oh god, another Erlich/Simons bet is needed: what's low is the level of rare earth exploration and exploitation not absolute supply. Is there a supply chain problem? Yes. Are we approaching a mad-max hell war for the last vestiges of humanities wonder mineral? Alas.. no. The ten years meme is based in a false premise. The article even says Australian known sources are only utilised at 14% and yet predicts a long term…
Another point the article missed: although batteries have a lifetime of 15-20 years (which they claim makes recycling infeasible), most people currently replace their cars far more frequently than that. Which means that either the cars will be scrapped and the battery materials recycled (if they really are all that valuable), or the global production of cars per capita will slow as people keep their cars for the life…
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2017/09/f37/fotw%239...
Sure, optimize current resource consumption and even bring technically inferior but more practical batteries to market, but also do not assume the electric vehicle end-state = swap electric for internal combustion.
For instance, would we have a possible resource crunch if US car ownership went from >1 car / person to 0.1 car / person or lower? That could happen in a few years now, with Uber / Lyft running on fossil fuels.
What if self-driving, electric vehicles come to market not as personal transport, but instead as transportation-as-a-service?
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Yeah is radioactive but you can build a bed out of it and sleep on it so its not radioactive in any practical sense. And of course Toxic is not a problem because most of the metals a rare earth mine would deal with would be toxic. You can actually find heavily concentrated earth in the US that would basically count as nuclear waste because nuclear policy is so insane.
To Woah: You might look here [0]. A great quote about the radiation levels: "Searching for uranium is in some ways easier than for other mineral resources because the radiation signature of uranium's decay products allows deposits to be identified and mapped from the air." Key phrase: mapped from the air That's a pretty high level. [0] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...
the benefit is that you can directly tell that it's uranium due to it giving off specific wavelengths, vs with diamonds, you need significant interpretation of the data to look for not-diamonds and hope that there are diamonds there too
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> nuclear warfare is going to be extremely limited due to lack of available weapons There's 15,000, which is easily enough to destroy a lot of cities and kill maybe half the world's population? https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohasw... I'll admit that we don't know what total warfare looks like in the 21st century when jets take a decade to build. I suspect it would look a lot more like Syria.
Nuclear weapons won't target cities, there simply aren't enough weapons to hit all of the military targets, so none would be left over for counter value. It makes little sense to target civilians, who can't directly inflict damage on your nation's military or citizens, when you have available military targets that will further the accomplishment of objectives. So all nuclear warfare in total war is counter force.
We need to work on super-springs, so you can wind up your car... LOL Right now there is a lot of lithium in the earth, much is not economic, but as lithium prices rise, more mines will become economic. Cobalt, as well as lithium will become far more highly recycled. Battery innards will be improved to reduce Cobalt use. Lithium use can not be reduced very much per KW hour, as the chemical changes oxidation state in a…
>Lithium is both light in weight and has nearly the highest possible voltage swing of ~~3.7 volts (versus 2 volts for lead and 1.2 volts for Nicads and NiMh which are many time heavier per KWHr in addition) IANAchemist, but this makes me wonder if there's some other chemistry out there, either undiscovered or deemed uneconomic, that offers even better performance than lithium.
There are, but of course there's tradeoffs. Lithium is the best all around cathode choice for economical reasons, but Sodium and Potassium are being explored as well. The real gains can be found in new electrolyte chemistries, though. My money is that we will be using lithium for the foreseeable future, and that advances in electrolyte chemistry will get us to the $100/kWh point.
The problem with Rare Earth is that the West collectively acts like 3 year old who are to dumb to solve incredibly simple problems. Rare earth contained lots of Thorium and that has to be handled as nuclear waste and that means you have 1000s of tons of nuclear waste on your hands. This is of course completely idiotic because Thorium not really a big problem as it is not radioactive. The few Rare Earth mines that do…
As someone currently dealing the consequences of being far too cavalier with long term environmental pollutants like PCBs and lead, I would argue that behavior you're describing as being that of a "3 year old" is actually a good example of government sanity, not stupidity. It's reasonable long term caution to avoid creating a bigger problem in the future. The true 3 year old behavior on display here is the market beh…