Converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into carbon nanotubes for use in batteries
kurzweilai.net
kurzweilai.net
Asbestos was a construction material that was often exposed to mechanical forces. Battery cathode is the furthest from that.
The same thing happened with the CFL bulbs that contain mercury - how many of them were disposed correctly? Luckily for us these will be replaced by LED bulbs very soon.
Do you have a citation for the CFL concern? I'm not expert in this area, but my quick checking only reveals this [1]:
> Even if the mercury contained in a CFL was directly > released into the atmosphere, an incandescent would > still contribute 4.65 more milligrams of mercury into > the environment over its lifetime.
Basically the same info from the EPA as well, here [2].
[1]: http://www.popularmechanics.com/home/reviews/a1733/4217864/
[2]: https://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/change_lig...
Putting them in phones would be a problem though.
You can get lung cancer as a non smoker. Or you can not get cancer whilst smoking a pack a day for 80 years. Each cigarette and similarly exposure to asbestos merely increases your chances.
Never ever grind/saw/sand/drill anything made with asbestos in it, just take it apart gently while wearing respiration gear and pack it in plastic, then deliver to a facility set up to handle it (where I live that is the municipality).
If you're dealing with sprayed on asbestos then let a professional company do the demolition, it is not worth lungcancer to save a few bucks and those people will have all the right equipment and will be able to remove it without releasing it into the environment.
Splitting CO2 will always require more energy than was released in making it. Where does that energy come from? They say solar panels. Because of course they do. But why would you burn fossil fuels to make energy, then use solar panels to turn CO2 into batteries? Why not just use solar panels in the first place? It would be far more efficient.
Also, we put about 10 Gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year. 2.7Gt of that is carbon. Just how many batteries are you planning on making from that? Does each person on Earth need half a ton of batteries?
Who's absorbing the astronomical costs of making batteries with atmospheric CO2, rather than with any of the sane carbon sources just lying around?
This plan is nonsensical. It's like solar roadways. It's stupidly expensive, and it just won't work. It's another bogus project dreamed up to make use of green tech research grants that will never see the light of day.
And solar roadways do work. But at least in current incarnations are better suited for pavements, open areas. And it may be expensive but that's only because we don't ascribe costs properly to fossil fuels e.g. carbon tax, health tax etc.
The basic idea is that we are well beyond reasonable co2 levels and that geological time is just catching up. But again, I'm no substitute for these well regarded scientists so it's best to read their research. There's a science based show named radio ecoshock if you're interested.
Depending on the lifetime of the batteries, it's probably not far from what it would actually take to switch over to renewable energy while bringing the rest of the world up to a western standard of life.
But you're absolutely right that it's nonsensical to harvest carbon from the atmosphere while you're still pumping it in. That's product design driven by PR, not engineering.
And that points to the rest of it being bullshit as well.
Because airplanes cannot fly on solar/batteries just yet?
Anyway, I agree with your main point.
Will it happen in 5 (or 500) years? Probably not, but it's not an entropy issue.
Please keep in mind that:
1. A Space Elevator would be considerably shorter than the distance from Earth to Moon. Regardless, there is no known material strong enough to support its own weight, let alone a payload, to geostationary orbital heights. [1]
2. The Earth and Moon are not tidally locked. You'll need a slip-path around the Earth's equator (or a gimbal at a pole) to allow the Earth to spin underneath the radiator pipe. Which (at the equator) will be moving at roughly 1,000 mph (1,700 kph).
3. Heat doesn't flow from colder to hotter objects. You'll need a rather large heat pump to make this project work.
4. If you're planning on radiating Earth's heat to the Moon, well, I suppose you could create a large lasing facility. There's been some theoretical work done in this area which you might find ... illuminating.[2]
But keep in mind: there's no need to direct those beams at the Moon. Space itself is a sink, and will absorb any and all energy beamed to it. What's critical is to balance the Earth's energy budget, which is presently too great by roughly 0.60± 0.17W/m².[3] Given Earth's surface area of about 510 million km², that works out to an excess energy of 306 TW. That compares against 12.3 TW total human world energy consumption.[4]
Whilst I'm not a fan of such geoengineering projects, the concept of a solar sunshade, or equivalent aerosol blocking, strikes me as more tractable.[5] It's easier to keep energy off a thing than to get energy out of a thing. Though what's being discussed here are shades of never-gonna-happen impossibility.
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Notes:
1. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator Carbon nanotube is about the only material possibly having sufficient tensile strength, though even that is doubtful.
2. https://what-if.xkcd.com/13/
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%27s_energy_budget#Earth....
Mine CaO, use atmospheric CO2 to convert it to CaCO3 this use that as feeder stock for making limestone-like and marble-like construction materials. These could be premium materials -- I could easily see Salesforce paying a premium to cover the floors of Salesforce tower in 'reclaimed atmospheric marble' to advertise their green creds -- or a down market material -- just mix it in to drywall to get the CO2 credits. Either way, this process would be much less fussy about the purity of the CO2 source.
Also, you'd need to reverse the topsoil destruction and the spread of agricultural exploitation, which is not going to be easy when the population keeps on growing.
Population frequently finds itself checked, one way or another.
Keep in mind that the carbon cycle was already in balance before humans started digging out gigatons of coal and pumping gigatons of petroleum. We've skewed that balance -- not by a terrible lot (or we'd have been in trouble a long time ago), but by enough.
The problem now is unwinding ~100 years of industrial fossil fuel use, quickly.
Remember that while plants fix carbon, it doesn't necessarily stay fixed, and you cannot release what you're fixing from the atmosphere if you want this to work.
Trees and plants don't fix CO2 "for free", they have a considerable energy budget they expend for this, and have other things to tend to as well (making leaves, drawing up water, fighting off disease and insects, feeding animals).
So you're talking about increasing plant growth beyond present levels, and preserving the carbon without allowing it to be re-released to the atmosphere for at least a few centuries. That's a tall order.
Humans fixing CO2 requires energy to do so, energy which will have to come from some non-emitting source (solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear are the only really viable options, hydro, tide and wave are too small to matter), and will compete against other human energy uses. Renewables have their own considerable energy input requirements as well for construction and maintenance, which multiple credible sources find close to the limits which allow technological society to happen (see Charles A.S. Hall's work on EROEI, he's got a book in progress due out next year I believe on the topic).
Once you've got the carbon, what you turn it into is relatively academic. Though if you do turn it into liquid hydrocarbons, it's 1) very long-term stable and 2) can be used, after the atmosphere returns to normal, which could be some centuries or longer, as fuel in dedicated applications so long as the net carbon cycle is appropriately managed.
Luckily we have an energy source that can easily pay back that energy debt, the sun.
I would say it does