2 ms·

I don't have answers, but I know that unless an element is very rare in the Earth's crust, price signals are usually pretty good at making supply rise very rapi

I don't have answers, but I know that unless an element is very rare in the Earth's crust, price signals are usually pretty good at making supply rise very rapidly. I was reading about the beginning of the nuclear age and how everybody thought that uranium would be in very short supply, but it turned out that once it becomes a valuable commodity, lots of cash goes into exploration and many new significant deposits are found. If there's no incentive, of course there's no point in even looking for the stuff. I know that's fuzzy, but I would guess that professor Sadoway did what he said that he did, which is to pick an element that is common and that should be cheap. I'm also not sure quite how many of these types of batteries we'd need. There are other methods of storage (ie. hydro power in places like Quebec, Norway, etc, which can act as giant regional batteries) and we can make the grid much smarter about demand-response and things like that. The solution won't be a single silver bullet, but a combination of things, including efficiency (lots of low-hanging fruits there, despite all the progress we've made -- the Rocky Mountain Institute has a lot of good stuff about this).

DennisP 14y ago
That's a good point, but those "price signals" could still result in the element being very expensive for quite a while, if we have to scale up production by two or three orders of magnitude. Hydro power is good as far as it goes, but there's only so much you can build: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-stor... But that's a good point on uranium. In fact, in Japan right now they're extracting uranium from seawater at about double the current cost of mined uranium. There's enough uranium in seawater to last us millions of years, especially if we went with fast reactors (which can burn U238, a hundred times more common than U235). That seems like a pretty good silver bullet to me.
- MikeCapone 14y ago
  > That's a good point, but those "price signals" could still result in the element being very expensive for quite a while, if we have to scale up production by two or three orders of magnitude. I'm not saying new supply will come online instantaneously, but it could be faster than most of us expect if price spikes enough. But in any case, grid-scale liquid-metal batteries would no doubt roll out like most other technologies, which is progressively enough to let supply mostly catch up. In the same way that cell phones or computers didn't go from zero to millions in a day, this will probably be done over many years.

DennisP 14y ago

That's a good point, but those "price signals" could still result in the element being very expensive for quite a while, if we have to scale up production by two or three orders of magnitude. Hydro power is good as far as it goes, but there's only so much you can build: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-stor... But that's a good point on uranium. In fact, in Japan right now they're extracting uranium from seawater at about double the current cost of mined uranium. There's enough uranium in seawater to last us millions of years, especially if we went with fast reactors (which can burn U238, a hundred times more common than U235). That seems like a pretty good silver bullet to me.

MikeCapone 14y ago
> That's a good point, but those "price signals" could still result in the element being very expensive for quite a while, if we have to scale up production by two or three orders of magnitude. I'm not saying new supply will come online instantaneously, but it could be faster than most of us expect if price spikes enough. But in any case, grid-scale liquid-metal batteries would no doubt roll out like most other technologies, which is progressively enough to let supply mostly catch up. In the same way that cell phones or computers didn't go from zero to millions in a day, this will probably be done over many years.