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my comment was strictly aimed at power generation. I don’t know much about steel refining so I have no idea if there are non-energetic advantages to using H2 vs CH4 or if CLF is taking advantage of H2 produced for other nearby industrial applications. I do know that at low temperatures, & in the absence of catalysts, H2 is a piss-poor reductant because of kinetics. Probably not a problem for steel refining.
The problem w ignoring thermo when evaluating ’greenness’ is that it’s like socialism - you eventually run out of other people’s money in cleaning up the mess.
The current administration is certainly not pursuing self-sufficiency. They will almost certainly contribute to holes being dug/drilled but much more likely to be in places that don’t care about “good union jobs”, the environment, and hurting the feelings of descendants of long dead migrants.
If the administration subsidizes Hectorite mining in the US, taxpayers might want to receive some assurance that the product will be used for what is being subsidized, eg batteries rather than lipstick. Hectorite is used, as the clay, in a bunch of things - including cosmetics. In the past 30 yrs, companies have managed to mine it very profitably in the US w/o govmint subsidies. I suspect the subsidies would cover the profit margin cut incurred in extracting lithium from the clay. Of course, that has some implications wrt to economics of batteries and what might happen if the subsidies went away.
converting CH4 to H2 can not be more economical than just burning the CH4. If it were, then somebody who isn’t gobbling stupid pills would’ve done it decades ago.
that tends to happen when people w social studies and education degrees run things
amazingly enough, that was also my 1st thought
One of the objections is water use related to use of sulfuric acid in extracting the lithium. If those deposits are as rich as I suspect they are, then the ore could be shipped to a location without a water problem. In the 1800s ranchers loved railroads. Also, sulfur is butt cheap and for the truly enterprising environmentalist, can be used as an energy source as well as a raw material (just different ends of the same processing stream).
yup. all part of the ‘business as usual’. You’ll know we are truly screwed when Jim-Bob and sons can no longer open a quarry.
business as usual with US mining operations. Always something…
btw: there are probably a bunch of these deposits in NV
I worked in a US National Lab facility w 5 PhD scientists in the org I was in. 1 of them fabricated results in most of his publications. He is still publishing & still employed even though the lab management knows. They “investigated”. Another guy was a “soft” misconductor. Things like omitting inconvenient data, changing trailing digits, & republishing same data. 8% is easy to believe
which is why there are “lies, damned lies and statistics”
Oh the heresy ;^)
1 picky thing: Dy was the only element in his list that is a “rare earth”. Our so knowledgeable Secretary of Energy is no better. She thinks that there are 30 rare earth elements. Crickets.
business as usual.
tangential notes: DOE is pushing lots of $ to research institutions to make the US “self-sufficient” wrt “critical metals” (quite the BS term but means REEs, Ni, Co, & Li currently). US scientists did a stellar job of understanding Cu ore deposit formation ~60 yrs ago and promptly put US Cu mining out of business (with a few exceptions). Supposedly much cheaper to exploit the ores in South America, Africa, Papua, etc. Until they aren’t. The peripheral costs in these places are always fatal to US companies (or other countries w anti-corruption and liability laws). Que China.
Another tangent: some folks in DOEland are pushing Bi compounds for nuclear waste treatment. If this happens, look for the price of bismuth to rocket. It’s already not cheap and I suspect it’s a much more problematic metal to find, mine, & process than REEs. ~80% currently imported from China.
selling that home would not be difficult. The real estate market in Nashville is screaming. I suspect the area around RVNC will transform like Cambridge/Kendall Sqr and Boston rail hub areas 30 yrs ago. What are/were some really crappy residential areas around RVNC are rapidly being condo-ized. Unfortunately, kind of haphazardly.
no argument from me about the snow job. It’s not just a political will problem. The Savannah River operation was canceled because costs were out of control and projected to be worse than dilute and dispose. Costs for that will undoubtedly do likewise. DOE has a problem in lack of competency and ability to stand up to phone calls from angry senators who receive large campaign contributions from DOE contractors. The contractors run the game and DOE is just the broker through whom your tax $ are funneled. Rick Perry was right until he sold his soul.
Th fuel will definitely not become a big deal anytime in the next several decades. I think the surplus Pu covered by a US-Russian treaty was supposed to be blended w Th for this purpose but after spending > $15B of your tax $ building facilities in SC to do the job, the feds canned the project and decided to bury the stuff in NM. Of course, that’s another boondoggle larded w fraud and waste that will cost >> $15B but everybody seems to love playing musical chairs.
Reactor SCRAMS are not terribly uncommon and I believe that most reactors are designed w passive shutdown mechanisms so that if there is a loss of power, control rods are inserted. Power is required to keep the control rods out.
That doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of room for incompetence and Fukushima was one of those cases. I don’t know the background on all of the problems but I believe the generators were required to keep the cooling pools containing used fuel rods full and circulating. The generators were in a low point so they were flooded. The cooling pools lost water and the used fuel rods overheated. I don’t know if that led to the reactor problems or was separate.
I say they’re obviously correct. Only the clueless or dishonest don’t see the problems and those problems come with many costs. Convincing people that those near term costs is worth avoiding the long term costs is not compatible w human nature.
mining is a shady business. I would only invest in large, multinationals. Even then the business is fraught w political dangers. I would not invest in silver or silver miners. Calling it a precious metal is a disservice to the concept. Similarly ‘rare earth’ metals aren’t rare. Just a matter of where they can be had for cheap and that doesn’t tend to happen in 1st or 2nd world countries. I have some very cynical views on where the world’s mining operations are headed but they are definitely non-PC so I’ll keep my fingers tied.
I wouldn’t touch any of them as a direct investment - ever. I expressed my opinion long ago that copper was the thing to invest in if the Dems won. Alternative/not-so-green energy schemes and EVs are great for materials and metals industries (also not-so-green)
anyone thinking of funding such projects should look at how much polyethylene, polypropylene and PET is consumed each year and then ask how much bioderived plastics can be produced and what resources will be consumed to do so. It won’t be pretty. I’d question the credibility of the Cambridge claim of industrial scalability unless they are talking about industrial in a 18th century context.
1 more rant. Somewhere in this thread is mention of polyhydroxyalkanoates as biodegradable plastic substitute. Marvelous for high margin plastics but the process of making involves similar processes to those that created petroleum. The obvious difference is that the petroleum generation didn’t require human investments in capital infrastructure, microbial care, and relatively small scale material extraction and purification. Hard to compete with what millions of years of Mother Nature did for free. The throughput can’t compete w demand and what passes through a refinery. In the absence of significant cultural changes wrt reuse, what is needed are biodegradable materials that can substitute, cost effectively, for bulk, single use plastics like those used in grocery bags and milk jugs. The mass of those continuously produced materials is enormous.
if wood trim was used now, somebody would probably sue for splinters or deforestation
I’m all for substitutes for single use plastics but substituting cellulosic materials for hydrocarbons to make same products is counterproductive.
a few years ago people were harvesting corn stalks for some climate related scheme. As soon as subsidies went away, corn stalks went back to getting plowed under.
Algae sounds great but has many problems in practical, large scale operation - regardless of the end product.
I don’t think penalizing or subsidizing product sources will cure the problems. If single use plastics are a problem, which I agree, then ban those products. Start w the flimsy plastic bags ubiquitous to grocery stores. Last time I was in rural Mexico, every tree line was covered w those bags. That’s not just ugly. I can’t imagine any more underdeveloped country is better.
Make or incentivize people to reuse bags/containers. When I was a wee human people commonly bought milk in glass bottles that were reused. Glass is more expensive in more than just $ to produce but it can be reused. Same for aluminum. Recycling plastics is a loser proposition.
I think people that want hydrocarbons to go away or believe they can be done without are somewhere between stupid and naive. As the oil company that NorthFace dis’d pointed out, every clothing product NorthFace sells is made at least partially w hydrocarbons. A 2 second look around you or on yourself will reveal several pounds/tons of hydrocarbon products. Anyone that thinks they can live comfortably without those things is very comfortable gathering wood, rubbing sticks together, and braiding leaves.
how do emissions go down and concentration goes up without removing N2 and O2?
recovering the battery-active material and separating lithium is conceptually simple - my bet is that separating lithium from iron phosphate batteries is particularly simple. The cost relative to starting afresh is what I’d worry about. I’d bet lots of acids involved so would need to be a high volume business.
there’s always the option of not subsidizing and not taxing although I’m all for taxing morons who build extravagant beach front homes in hurricane prone areas.
I once came across an individual who had built one such home on the southern terminus of Siesta Key at Midnight Pass. The waves were literally washing over his swimming pool and up against his house. He was begging a government employee to let him build a breakwater. He was denied. Homeowner did anyway. Closed up Midnight Pass and made 1 island out of what had been 2. Still that way after 40+ yrs. But I think the house is abandoned. People like that need to be taxed into oblivion.
“expect to…”
those are some exceedingly expensive tomatoes. High end restaurants are willing to pay for fresh herbs and even some vegetables so greenhouse operations can make money. But that’s part of the problem for this company. There are 100s of small greenhouse operators within 200 miles of these guys - all growing the same stuff but for a fraction of the cost and margins aren’t great. Product differentiation is the only viable saving grace, eg developing a means to grow vanilla beans in a KY greenhouse. Tomatoes in KY won’t cut it.
EVs merely offer the opportunity to localize CO2 generation vs ICE vehicles. However, since the unwashed want EV batteries to be recharged by windmills and solar farms, the CO2 generation is merely displaced to a different set of dispersed generators. There is some overlap in the organic polymers used in the EV chain and those polymers tend to originate from natural gas and oil.
neither. All a matter of cost and what people can or are willing to pay. Lithium is not scarce. Obviously, oil isn’t either. I believe that the Australian lithium resources are primarily pegmatite - the lithium is bound in silicate minerals. Fairly easy to separate out the lithium minerals but very expensive to separate the lithium from the host minerals. A very large chunk of that expense is the energy cost. Thermodynamics is a bitch.
The definition of GMO doesn’t need to be loosened anywhere close to “infrastructure” to have all grains fall into being GMO
seems implicitly statist and fearful. Future is gonna happen. ‘Proofing’ against it seems to say that they are acknowledging that they have no imagination and adaptability.
a friend in an industry lab told me that he caught a technician boiling an HF solution on a bench top. Yay for HR departments and economists.
but that goes to Roy’s point about it being a bigger problem than Tesla. Fire Dept’s, & population in general, will have to have better access to means of extinguishment of Li battery fires. The reaction betw the active battery material & water is not much unlike adding water to burning magnesium. Just makes a bigger fire. Spraying water around an Li fire is a fine thing to do but putting water on an Li fire won’t accomplish much.
True about Darwin but Li battery fires don’t burn gradually. It might take awhile to breach the case and ignite but, once ignited, they’ll burn with a vengeance. I suspect the duration and periodic re-ignition in this case was due to the water they used to extinguish the fire. The water exacerbated the problem.
many former Manhattan Project sites (ORNL, Hanford, ...) have a plethora of ducks, geese etc. Oak Ridge has/had an annual deer hunt for pop control. Road blocks on reservation exits to radiological survey deer. The hunters/fisher-people who eat game/fish from around those sites are nuts.
what is the relevance?
‘industrial’ farmers will adjust (not like they’ve been rolling in $ last few years). It will mean higher prices for consumers. As it is, my impression is that crop subsidies/insurance programs are much reduced from what they were 30 yrs ago. My family hasn’t raised cattle in decades but I don’t remember beef subsidies ever being a thing.
subsidy programs seem to be a game of musical chairs. Solar farms being the new variant. I can’t believe that such enterprises will be profitable in the tornado belt without government ’protections’ but solar companies are pushing hard to buy and lease land. There are concerns that if government solar incentives go away, the solar companies will abandon the hardware, leaving it for landowners to clean up. Many of the solar operators seem to be foreign owned so legal recourse would be ‘complicated’
people may not go bankrupt but they do go without. If they don’t go without, then they end up paying for their “free” healthcare thru the taxes on the higher priced products. Also, the supposedly free healthcare in other countries isn’t remotely free. People still have private insurance in many of the countries with ‘single payer healthcare systems. Been there, done all that.
this is something that most Americans don’t get: they like to point to ‘free healthcare’ in other countries but don’t realize that things like milk cost 3x more in those countries. The cost differentials tend to work out to be roughly the same across developed countries but having ‘free healthcare’, cheap beer, cheap gas, cheap milk, cheap fruit.... is not something that is gonna happen.
seems reasonable as far as space utilization and reducing evaporation. I'm sure that there will be other unappreciated consequences mostly related to biology, e.g. algal/fungal/mosses and other growths and recolonization effects. I'd bet that the back sides of the panels act as condensers which might create other problems. Humans being human, i also think vandalization will be a huge and eventually fatal problem.