331–340 of 341 posts
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> But a Swedish speaking Finn this is the argument Russia has used to invade Ukraine...
Swedish is an official language in Finland nowadays. Back then, it was just a part of Sweden (Finland was not independent)
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Because we care about the environment a bit more in Europe and Scandinavia than we used to. Part of responsible planet ownership is foregoing short term gain for a nice planet to live on long term.
Mining lots of various minerals is necessary to transition the world to a net-neutral climate gas economy that has similar standard of living as today. Huge increases in production of batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, synthetic fuel production and so on. And this is necessary because the people of the world are not willing to reduce their standard of living to a level where net neutral climate gas emissions are…
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1 mine producing 1% of global output seems insane no?
There are comparable statistics for other commodities: Ukraine produces 3% of the worlds wheat.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: you've been doing repeatedly lot lately, and we ban such accounts. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34385788.
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32100785 (July 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26010177 (Feb 2021)
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
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It's also stupid and insulting, because those discoveries have far more to do with the capability of Swedish chemists than they do with geography.
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If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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Mining lots of various minerals is necessary to transition the world to a net-neutral climate gas economy that has similar standard of living as today. Huge increases in production of batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, synthetic fuel production and so on. And this is necessary because the people of the world are not willing to reduce their standard of living to a level where net neutral climate gas emissions are…
With that attitude, I really hope Sweden goes "that's not our problem" and leaves it where it found it. Heaven forbid we might want to use it for infinitely better things, say, 300 years from now. When we're no longer a shit species destroying the planet. If we're lucky.
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I don't know anyone who refers to the element as wolfram in English. The abbreviations are internationally standardized and many don't stand for the English words anyway (Latin is quite common, e.g. Pb means plumbum, for lead).
I also don't know anyone who refers to it as wolfram, but wolfram is all over the tungsten wikipedia page.
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> "Rare-earths" are not, incidentally, needed for electric vehicles, wind turbines, or solar panels, however much certain people wish they were, or confidently claim. What exactly does this mean? EVs use a ton more rare earth minerals than conventional cars https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/minerals-used... Solar panels use silicon, indium, gallium, selenium, cadmium, and tellurium. Neodymium and dyspros…
most solar panels do not currently use indium, gallium, selenium, cadmium, or tellurium, none of which are rare earth elements (though indium is pretty rare) the solar panels that used those cannot economically compete with silicon pv for utility-scale solar any more (perhaps that will change) silicon is also not a rare earth element (and is not at all rare) evs and wind turbines can use rare earth elements, it's tru…
"According to Philip Pesavento, Cove then managed to refine the composition of the alloy close to Zn4Sb3 – a zinc-antimony alloy with proportions of 4 parts zinc to 6 parts antimony. That, we now know, is also a semiconductor. However, it has a bandgap of 1.2 eV – very close to the bandgap of silicon (1.1 eV). Consequently, it turned his thermophotovoltaic generator into a photovoltaic generator:
“In his enthusiasm, Cove probably made up a larger number of plugs and somehow got the proportions “wrong” on one batch. He then measured an even larger voltage. Finally, he made a careful study of zinc-antimony alloys and found that the 40-42% range zinc alloy gave the highest voltage (compared to 35% zinc in ZnSb). Having – accidentally – discovered Zn4Sb3, the higher bandgap of this semiconductor meant that it no longer worked when it was exposed to the heat from a wood stove. However, it worked even better when it was exposed to solar energy – because it was now converting far more of the visible spectrum of sunlight efficiently into electricity.”
Using colored glass filters, George Cove determined that most of the response was from the violet end of the spectrum and only a little from the so-called heat rays. His earlier PV plugs had responded equally well to heat rays and violet rays, while the older thermoelectric generators (German silver at both sides) did not respond to the violet rays at all.
Bring back the Schottky solar cell? Schottky junction solar cells have commanded only a small amount of attention from researchers and corporations – few solar cell designs use metals in the active region, other than for contacts. [22] Nevertheless, Philip Pesavento believes that it would be worthwhile to attempt to fabricate some Schottky solar cells according to Cove’s design:
“If it could be demonstrated that Zn4Sb3 (bandgap 1.2 eV) can be used in a photovoltaic cell, there is a good chance that such a solar cell design will be sustainable. It would be a good candidate for a quick EROI and have an acceptably long operational life with a surplus energy output over several decades. It’s astounding that everyone seems to have missed this material and its application to photovoltaic cells and that no development has been done – even after researchers briefly recognized it as being a possible option in the early to mid-1980s. It fits in the category of a premature discovery which should mean it could be developed very quickly in this day and age.”