LENR vs Solar/Wind, and emerging Green Technologies.

Quote from interested observer

We are not going to sacrifice 38,000 lives a year so they can engage in their hobby. That would be like allowing drag races on urban surface roads. The driving enthusiasts are going to have to move to private property and racetracks.”

I would have been far more convinced by that argument before watching an extra hundred thousand or more Americans die because people consider it too big a sacrifice of their precious personal freedom to wear a face mask at the store.

You make a valid point. Even in an imaginary situation in which automated cars were prevalent today, if you were to suggest that human driven cars should be banned in 20 years, many people would fight like the dickens to prevent that. There would be a hue and cry. They would say the Constitution gives us the right to drive cars, and you will have to pry the steering wheel out of my cold, dead hands. And so on. That's how it would be today. But . . . decades from now, when nearly every car is automated, most people will not have driver's licenses. They won't even know how to drive. They will never see a steering wheel. The present generation of drivers will be long dead. It will no longer be an emotional issue. In other words, I predict a gradual change will eventually culminate in banning human-driven cars. It might take about as long as it took to ban pedestrians and bicycles from controlled access highways in the U.S., which I think became the general rule in the 1960s, although in some states they are still allowed.

Even 100 years from now, I suppose there will still be people who drive for the fun of it. There are people who ride horses for the fun of it. At a transportation museum park I saw an enthusiast giving rides on a steam-powered tractor pulling a wagon. There are people today who drive manual stick shift cars for the fun of it -- including me, until about a year ago when my car finally died. But there are not many people who like stick shift cars, and we are not going to rise in revolt if we can no longer buy them.

There are people who drive the original version of Model T Fords for the fun of it. That is a lot harder than you might think! My late mother was the last person I knew who could do that. She drove one around New York City when she was 13 years old, because my grandfather did not like to drive, and driver's license laws were not enforced. She could -- and did -- drive "anything with wheels."

The fact that my mother drove in New York City at age 13, in the 1930s, shows how much social norms and attitudes have changed. The people who are up in arms about wearing masks today, and who be outraged at the thought of banning human-driven cars, would never say: "we should allow unlicensed 13-year-olds to drive on city streets." They would be shocked at the idea. I imagine many of them would even say I am lying, and such things never happened. Such people often have little knowledge of the past, so they do not realize that things can change. They live in the eternal present. A person can only feel life changing and see the shape of the future by studying the past. The more you know of the past, the more you can predict of the future.

Quote from interested observer

I do, however, doubt that human driving will be banned or even highly restricted during the next 20 years.

I doubt that too. 20 years is too soon. There will still be millions of manually driven cars on the road in 20 years. Self-driving cars have not even been introduced. (A few shuttles are in use in China, Japan and one place in Georgia.)

I had in mind approximately 20 years after the year when self-driving cars become ubiquitous, and the sales of manual cars are about as rare as manual-stick shift cars today. By that time most young adults may not even get driver's licenses.

Quote from interested observer

But there will necessarily be an extended period of time when there is a mix of human- and self-driven cars on the roads.

Yes. A dangerous mix. In some ways it may even be more dangerous than all-human driven cars. There was a long period starting around 1905 when U.S. urban roads had a mixture of horses, cars, bicycles and pedestrians. There were many accidents. Many third-world roads are still like that. Their casualty rates are much higher than the developed world. The sooner we can get past that, the better.

Quote from Alan Smith

each with 250 kilos of batteries that would require 68 million tons of batteries. That nobody has mastered the art of recycling properly.

I assume that recycling technology would improve as the number of electric cars increase. As the mass of batteries increase, the economic incentive to recycle them increases. New ways to recycle are invented. That's not a sure thing, but that's how it usually works.

Quote from Alan Smith

AKA 'kicking the can down the road'.

Nope. Not at all. AKA Waiting until the market is primed to finance a comprehensive solution. There would be no point to designing a 2-MW wind turbine in 1990. The towers and other components were not ready. Engineers and installers did not have enough experience. When the market expanded, and the stage was set, then it became possible -- then inevitable.

Different methods of lithium recycling should be developed on a small scale now. Let the market sort them out and find the most cost effective ones. Let safety standards be set. When the time comes to expand, the technology and expertise will have grown organically, without planning, pushed by free market forces. There is no better way to bring about progress.

Quote from Alan Smith

AKA 'kicking the can down the road'. BTW, there are 1.4Bn vehicles in the world, that would require 350M tons of batteries.

The 1.4 billion automobiles currently would have 190 Mt of batteries in them already.

Quote from Paradigmnoia

The 1.4 billion automobiles currently would have 190 Mt of batteries in them already.

Do you mean lead-acid batteries in conventional automobiles? Lead acid batteries are recycled with nearly 100% efficiency. Lead is one of the best recovered materials there is. I read somewhere that isotopic studies show that some of the lead in the system has been around since the Middle Ages. Some may actually have been mined in ancient Rome.

If you have an old lead acid battery from a battery backup or wheelchair, you may be able to dispose of it in a nearby automobile repair garage or dealership. There is a garage near my house that has a bin full of lead-acid batteries in the back. Someone comes back periodically to collect them. They do not pay anything but the batteries are all recycled.

Quote from Alan Smith

That sounds like warlord capitalism. Screw the planet now, and promise child maintenance later.

Oh come now. Child maintenance, education, food safety and other social benefits can be ensured with regulation. Regulation overrules pure capitalism, as it should. No one said we need a 100% pure free-market system. That has never worked, and never will. The government must play a strong role in regulating, and also funding fundamental R&D in things like physics.

However, I think most technical problems are best solved by free-market mechanisms. The best way to reduce CO2 emissions would be to put in a carbon tax and let the market decide how to reduce tax payments. This is better than having the government or a large corporation pick one technology in favor of another. The best technology will emerge. After that happens, the government may need to regulate it in some fashion. In 1990 it was not clear whether any alternative energy would be economically viable. Gradually, wind power and PV solar power emerged, and things like concentrated solar power did not progress. Wind and solar are now cheaper than coal, so the problem is on its way to being solved. Of course the government played a role and there were some subsidies, but it was largely done by free-market competition.

Many technical problems have been fixed gradually over time by incremental improvements that no one was in charge of. In the 1970s and 80s there was what people called an "applications crisis" in software. People were not writing enough industry specific programs such as a inventory system well suited to a drug store. There were not enough programmers. Gradually, over time, programming became much easier. Millions of people learned to program. Now there are apps for every conceivable industry sector, and everything else a person might want.

Quote from Curbina

That’s true, albeit lead is much easier to recycle as it comes in batteries, Lithium is a less straight forward to separate and keep pure material. Anyway, we will eventually know. I can’t help remembering the claims of Bob Lazar about being able to synthesize Li 6 and using it to store hydrogen in high density solid state for powering his red corvette. Perhaps that would be a much more practical solution, if it weren’t illegal to sell or purchase Li-6.

Why? Tritium production I'm guessing.

The process of recycling Lithium based batteries is well understood and scalable to the needed capacity:

https://electrek.co/2019/04/16…battery-recycling-system/

https://insideevs.com/features…raubel-battery-recycling/

"Straubel explains to Vance that the materials in batteries can be recycled indefinitely. “There’s no real limit to it. There’s no degradation that happens to those atoms of lithium or cobalt or nickel. It’s one of the coolest things about this—those metals are basically infinitely recyclable. Except for the small amounts that get lost in the recycling process itself, you can basically keep doing that again and again and again, so you can start to imagine a future where you’re thinking, ‘If we can do this a thousand times, the need for mining new materials starts to dwindle.’”