And for EV batteries when they switch from Lithium/Cobalt to Sodium.
Sodium is not in the pipeline. But Magnesium would be an upgrade.
LENR vs Solar/Wind, and emerging Green Technologies.
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Crucially, even if we had a new energy source - mineral shortages will hamper the continual drive for "growth".
That is silly. PV and wind turbines do not take any more materials than natural gas or coal. They take less, because they do not need pipelines or a continuous flow of coal by railroad. As one power company exec said, "you put in an order, six months later the turbines come by railroad, you set it up and forget it." It works for 30 years with hardly any maintenance. Most of materials in turbines can be recycled, and all of it soon will be, except the towers. The towers should last 100 years or more, like hydroelectric dams. There is a 17 MW hydroelectric dam near my house made in 1904 that is still going strong:
There are reasons why wind and solar are now far cheaper than fossil fuel. One of the reasons is the cost of materials is lower, because it uses less material over the life of the generator. The energy payback is also much higher. I mean energy overhead is lower. Think of all the energy it takes to mine and ship coal.
Wind turbines are made out of the same steel and other materials as fossil fuel turbines, and the duty cycle is about the same as coal. Because coal is so expensive, they don't want to use it.
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Sodium is not in the pipeline. But Magnesium would be an upgrade.
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next year the chinese start with mass production of sodium batteries.
interesting because of cheap and abundend raw materials. -
Crucially, even if we had a new energy source - mineral shortages will hamper the continual drive for "growth".
This is twice ridiculous when it comes to PV solar cells. They are made of silicon. Silicon is the second most abundant element on the earth's surface, after oxygen. No, we are not running out of sand.
This reminds me of people who say we are running out of places to erect wind turbines. That is, running out of usable wind energy. No, we are not. On-shore U.S. wind could produce 37 million GWh of electricity. Total U.S. production today is 4 million GWh:
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/51555.pdf
Offshore wind could produce 18 times more than total global electricity demand today.
Offshore Wind Outlook 2019 – Analysis - IEAOffshore Wind Outlook 2019 - Analysis and key findings. A report by the International Energy Agency.www.iea.org -
https://www.resilience.org/sto…gy-transition-is-failing/
Crucially, even if we had a new energy source - mineral shortages will hamper the continual drive for "growth".
There is no real shortage of any stable element. Just a shortage of energy and will.
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next year the chinese start with mass production of sodium batteries.
Lets wait for the mass test. Costs are outpaced by more weight . Cycle numbers will be seen also degradation. But for homes/solar this is no problem. But here flow batteries are much cheaper.
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Mass testing of sodium batteries is already underway. The Faraday Institution in the UK is running an intensive programme on this supported by battery manufacturers who undertsand that their Lithium-Ion production lines don't need much alteration to manufacture sodium cells, and they will no longer need to pay high (and still rising) proces for Lithium and Cobalt. Sodium cells are also easier to recycle and don't need cooling.
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There is no real shortage of any stable element. Just a shortage of energy and will.
Yes! See Arthur C. Clarke's masterpiece, "Profiles of the Future." In Chapter 12, "Ages of Plenty" he discusses ways of extracting minerals from earth, then from the solar system. QUOTE:
Going still further afield, we know that there are enormous quantities of metal (much of it the highest grade of nickel-iron) floating round the solar system in the form of meteorites and asteroids. The largest asteroid, Ceres, has a diameter of 450 miles, and there may be thousands over a mile across. It is interesting to note that a single iron asteroid 300 yards in diameter would supply the world's present needs for a year. . . .
The heavy hydrogen in the seas can drive all our machines, heat all our cities, for as far ahead as we can imagine. If, as is perfectly possible, we are short of energy two generations from now, it will be through our own incompetence. We will be like Stone age men freezing to death on top of a coal bed. . . .
The seas of this planet contain 100,000,000,000,000,000 tons of hydrogen and 20,000,000,000,000 tons of deuterium. Soon we will learn to use these simplest of all atoms to yield unlimited power. Later—perhaps very much later—we will take the next step, and pile our nuclear building blocks on top of each other to create any element we please. When that day comes, the fact that gold, for example, might turn out to be slightly cheaper than lead will be of no particular importance.
This survey should be enough to indicate—though not to prove—that there need never be any permanent shortage of raw materials. Yet Sir George Darwin's prediction (page 85) that ours would be a golden age compared with the aeons of poverty to follow, may well be perfectly correct. In this inconceivably enormous universe, we can never run out of energy or matter. But we can all too easily run out of brains. . . .
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Yes! See Arthur C. Clarke's masterpiece, "Profiles of the Future." In Chapter 12, "Ages of Plenty" he discusses ways of extracting minerals from earth, then from the solar system. QUOTE:
If anybody would like a pdf copy of this book, please email me via the forum.
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If anybody would like a pdf copy of this book, please email me via the forum.
Where did you get that? I made a copy for Clarke, which he used to write the Millennium Edition in 1999. See p. 13:
https://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJreviewofpr.pdf
This year, a corporation asked me for a copy. They found me because my name is listed in the Millennium Edition. I said, "I would be happy to send you a copy, if you get permission from the publisher." So the corporation, the publisher and Clarke's estate went back and forth for months with e-mails and permission forms. When they finally got it straightened out, I sent the copy. They proofread it again. They did not report any problems.
I wonder if the corporation leaked that copy to you.
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JedRothwell You never know. We live in a tiny niche , a tribe with common interests.
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From Benchmark Mineral Intelligence Newsletter...
LG Chem said this week it will spend $3.2 billion to build a cathode production facility in Tennessee. The company is targeting 120,000 tonnes of cathode production a year by 2027. If it succeeds, this would more than double the potential cathode production of North America. The announcement is the latest direct foreign investment in Tennessee's history and further cements the state's growing position as a key battery hub in the US.
It comes following two years of rising cathode prices. Benchmark's Cathode Price Index has risen a third this year and is over double what it was in January 2021. In part, this is due to rising lithium carbonate prices which have risen by over 120% this year in China and are still trading at record high levels. To make things worse, some cathode plants are failing to receive the lithium they ordered in long-term contracts forcing them to buy material in spot markets.
Elsewhere, the three largest non-Chinese lithium producers are all continuing to invest in China, despite growing geopolitical risks. In a data-rich story this week, Benchmark Source looks at the quantities of lithium produced by Albermarle, Livent and SQM in China, North America, and Free Trade Agreement countries.
Batteries are more than just lithium, however. One often overlooked mineral in NCM cathodes is manganese. Although there is ample manganese ore, the capacity to refine it into the high-purity manganese sulphate required for batteries is almost entirely in China. Only two facilities outside of China are currently operational. In an article this week, Benchmark Source looks at the options outside of China.
On the other side of the battery is the anode, typically made from either natural or synthetic graphite. Although synthetic graphite has higher emissions, natural graphite isn't without its own set of woes. Violence in Mozambique and climate change are amongst the factors making its supply chain more fragile than that of synthetic graphite.
benchmarkminerals.com
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Sodium seems to be an international trend: Broadbit Batteries
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Yes! See Arthur C. Clarke's masterpiece, "Profiles of the Future." In Chapter 12, "Ages of Plenty" he discusses ways of extracting minerals from earth, then from the solar system. QUOTE:
Going still further afield, we know that there are enormous quantities of metal (much of it the highest grade of nickel-iron) floating round the solar system in the form of meteorites and asteroids. The largest asteroid, Ceres, has a diameter of 450 miles, and there may be thousands over a mile across. It is interesting to note that a single iron asteroid 300 yards in diameter would supply the world's present needs for a year. . . .
The heavy hydrogen in the seas can drive all our machines, heat all our cities, for as far ahead as we can imagine. If, as is perfectly possible, we are short of energy two generations from now, it will be through our own incompetence. We will be like Stone age men freezing to death on top of a coal bed. . . .
The seas of this planet contain 100,000,000,000,000,000 tons of hydrogen and 20,000,000,000,000 tons of deuterium. Soon we will learn to use these simplest of all atoms to yield unlimited power. Later—perhaps very much later—we will take the next step, and pile our nuclear building blocks on top of each other to create any element we please. When that day comes, the fact that gold, for example, might turn out to be slightly cheaper than lead will be of no particular importance.
This survey should be enough to indicate—though not to prove—that there need never be any permanent shortage of raw materials. Yet Sir George Darwin's prediction (page 85) that ours would be a golden age compared with the aeons of poverty to follow, may well be perfectly correct. In this inconceivably enormous universe, we can never run out of energy or matter. But we can all too easily run out of brains. . . .
I calculated once that there is about 2 000 000 000 pounds of uranium in the Pacific Ocean sea water.
(It might have been kg.)
There’s way more on land.
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I calculated once that there is about 2 000 000 000 pounds of uranium in the Pacific Ocean sea water.
In the eighties there was run to ion selective electrodes to filter sea water. I'm pretty sure it works very well for some like Au. But only a fool will tell you where he gets the free meal.
There also exist some highly selective plants. Tobacco ashes contain a lot (up to 1%) of Pt,Pd. Also Nickel can be harvested by a scrub. It's actually used to decontaminate soil. But all these process need plenty of time.
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In the eighties there was run to ion selective electrodes to filter sea water. I'm pretty sure it works very well for some like Au. But only a fool will tell you where he gets the free meal.
There also exist some highly selective plants. Tobacco ashes contain a lot (up to 1%) of Pt,Pd. Also Nickel can be harvested by a scrub. It's actually used to decontaminate soil. But all these process need plenty of time.
I don’t suggest that mining seawater is a good or viable idea.
We are surrounded by enough materials to assemble a small rocky planet. That’s a very large resource.
We can mine gold cost effectively at grades down to 0.1 ppm (0.1 gram per tonne), and extract it cost effectively down to 0.01 ppm if there is copper or something else to pay for the processing. That’s because we made gold valuable enough to bother with developing the technology to do so. -
Re: tobacco ash with 1 % Pd/Pt
Selsun Blue, the strong version, dried (to a rubbery semi-solid) and tested by most common field portable XRF devices on the market today, will show 5 to 20% platinum content.Good luck getting rich with my secret source of wealth.
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Re: tobacco ash with 1 % Pd/Pt
Selsun Blue, the strong version, dried (to a rubbery semi-solid) and tested by most common field portable XRF devices on the market today, will show 5 to 20% platinum content.Good luck getting rich with my secret source of wealth.
You mean it’s a false measurement or that is not cost effective?
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You mean it’s a false measurement or that is not cost effective?
A measurement is only as good as the control.
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A measurement is only as good as the control.
In Chemical Analysis you simply calibrate your instruments against a known amount. That’s usually the control. Complex matrixes force you to perform a extraction before measuring and that obviously introduces noise. You can question the calibration, you can ask for increasing the sample size, but if a good chemical analysis laboratory tells you a result is consistently found on a product, I wouldn’t have much reasons to doubt it.
