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> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource The article goes into why this is incredibly difficult. The vast majority of lithium batteries are in landfills,
by djsumdog 6y ago
> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource
The article goes into why this is incredibly difficult. The vast majority of lithium batteries are in landfills, compressed between all our other garbage because maybe 2% of people on the planet properly dispose of e-waste.
As far as clean energy, have you watched Planet of the Humans (2020)? I want to say, I despise Michael Moore emotional bullshit, but despite his influence on the film's production, the case it makes is solid: the vast majority of "renewables" are actually trees. When you hear "woodchips" .. there is no amount of industrial wood scrap waste that is viable without also cutting down trees. You start burning fast-growing trees (often planted for paper or lumber) for fuel and you get a system of power production that makes no sense over traditional gas or oil.
Solar and wind may have been growing exponentially, but they still require oil/gas standby plants. They also take a lot of resources to make. Wind turbines aren't currently recycled.
The fact of the matter is, we have one real hope left. The ITER. If real fusion power is possible, we'll find out once it's completed. If ITER fails to produce sustainable and efficient power, it's unlikely anyone else will get the funding to build a bigger reactor.
It's not coal that's in terminal decline ... it's everything. No amount of increasing consumption or building "more green" is going to change that. We need to consume less, and let's face it ... that's fucking impossible.
- Accujack 6y agoYou're ignoring current SMR technology in nuclear. Old style giant, expensive nuclear power plants are a non starter, but small modular reactors have a lot of promise, are zero emissions once running, and can be built using green energy in factories instead of constructed on site. Fission power plants are pretty much the only way to go fully "green"... renewables are great and have a big place in the future, but unless humanity wants to drastically change their consumption of technologies and products requiring large amounts of energy for production (like Aluminum), they don't provide power in the right amounts and time spans.
- CaptArmchair 6y agoA point few proponents of fission power tend to mention is that Uranium supplies are also finite. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium Unless there are major breakthroughs in nuclear technology which become commercially viable in the near future - that is, in this 21st century - nuclear power, as it stands, is running out of time, and it does so faster then most people assume.
- HPsquared 6y agoMolten salt, breeder and Thorium reactors can achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements, and aren't exactly groundbreaking technology. Reprocessing as well. Several examples from decades ago, and new designs in the pipeline. The main problems are politics and lack of funding.
- CaptArmchair 6y agoThe Wikipedia page highlights that there's certainly discussion, doubt and controversy surrounding those technologies. The decisive factor of change I can see here is the unproven commercial viability of alternatives at the moment as Uranium is still cheap. Whether or not those alternatives become viable once Uranium prices increase isn't easily predicted. So, I remain highly skeptical towars claims that dismiss the issue as merely a problem of "politics and lack of funding".
- Accujack 6y agoDid you read the part about breeder reactors above? You can create fuel for the SMRs via a centrally administered and controlled (to avoid nuclear proliferation) reactor, so no need to worry about uranium... in fact, it might make sense to avoid the ecological impact of uranium mining anyway. SMRs are being developed that use other fuels, too, that are available in abundance, like Thorium: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306454918300586 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645491...
- djsumdog 6y agoand we've wasted so much of our uranium making bombs that can never be used as fuel. There is research in trying to use highly enriched uranium as a fuel source, but I doubt that will ever be a safe reality.
- Accujack 6y agoIt's the other way around. Highly enriched uranium has been easy to use as a fuel source for decades. Using less enriched material has always been a problem, actually. CANDU (Canadian design) did a pretty good job making it work, though. Nuclear weapons didn't use much uranium, they manufactured and processed plutonium. By the way, a lot of nuclear fuel in the past few decades has been reprocessed material from weapons that were decommissioned. I believe the US even traded with the Russians for their spare plutonium.
- wussboy 6y ago“Why is it that when we see nothing but progress behind, we see nothing but disaster ahead?”
- creato 6y ago> The vast majority of lithium batteries are in landfills, compressed between all our other garbage because maybe 2% of people on the planet properly dispose of e-waste. Is this representative of small electronics and not vehicles? It will obviously be a lot harder and more economically significant to improperly dispose of a battery pack for a car than a cell phone.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]