Comment by 1053r | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 1053r | Hacker News Reader

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The parent comment is a pack of memes straight out of a propaganda machine.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/new-data-show-electri...

Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it, but that energy is increasingly sourced by clean energy sources. Let me cite the oil company, BP.

https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...

Coal is in terminal decline. Solar and wind have been growing exponentially, and are on a path to pass coal within the decade. Projections to the contrary have to explain why decades of industrial economics theory are wrong, where manufactured goods (like solar and wind generators) get cheaper by a fairly consistent % every time you double production. This creates a virtuous cycle that will drive coal and other fossil fuels out of business through profit seeking alone. (We are past the tipping point on costs here.) The burden of proof is on the fossil fuel advocates like yourself at this point. (This article is from 2015, and the IEA and similar keep getting it wrong since then.)

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2015/11/17/why-the-iea-is-consis...

> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource

The article goes into why this is incredibly difficult. The vast majority of lithium batteries are in landfills, compressed between all our other garbage because maybe 2% of people on the planet properly dispose of e-waste.

As far as clean energy, have you watched Planet of the Humans (2020)? I want to say, I despise Michael Moore emotional bullshit, but despite his influence on the film's production, the case it makes is solid: the vast majority of "renewables" are actually trees. When you hear "woodchips" .. there is no amount of industrial wood scrap waste that is viable without also cutting down trees. You start burning fast-growing trees (often planted for paper or lumber) for fuel and you get a system of power production that makes no sense over traditional gas or oil.

Solar and wind may have been growing exponentially, but they still require oil/gas standby plants. They also take a lot of resources to make. Wind turbines aren't currently recycled.

The fact of the matter is, we have one real hope left. The ITER. If real fusion power is possible, we'll find out once it's completed. If ITER fails to produce sustainable and efficient power, it's unlikely anyone else will get the funding to build a bigger reactor.

It's not coal that's in terminal decline ... it's everything. No amount of increasing consumption or building "more green" is going to change that. We need to consume less, and let's face it ... that's fucking impossible.

> The vast majority of lithium batteries are in landfills, compressed between all our other garbage because maybe 2% of people on the planet properly dispose of e-waste.

Is this representative of small electronics and not vehicles? It will obviously be a lot harder and more economically significant to improperly dispose of a battery pack for a car than a cell phone.

You're ignoring current SMR technology in nuclear.

Old style giant, expensive nuclear power plants are a non starter, but small modular reactors have a lot of promise, are zero emissions once running, and can be built using green energy in factories instead of constructed on site.

Fission power plants are pretty much the only way to go fully "green"... renewables are great and have a big place in the future, but unless humanity wants to drastically change their consumption of technologies and products requiring large amounts of energy for production (like Aluminum), they don't provide power in the right amounts and time spans.

A point few proponents of fission power tend to mention is that Uranium supplies are also finite. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium

Unless there are major breakthroughs in nuclear technology which become commercially viable in the near future - that is, in this 21st century - nuclear power, as it stands, is running out of time, and it does so faster then most people assume.

> Uranium supplies are also finite

So is the sun, and they will both last for roughly the same time, i.e. 5 billion years.[1]

[1] http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen.html

You just referred to a HTML page

... having a counter on the bottom which says:

> The number of hits on this page since 1996 Feb 12

... a HTTP Response Header

> Last-Modified Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:38:36 GMT

Stating that these aren't "the latest insights" would be putting it mildly.

My comment referred to commercial viability. It at this point in time, Uranium has only been extracted from seawater in a laboratory setting, per the Wikipedia article I referenced.

Yes, there's always "but technology will advance to a point where it will be viable". But then I'd argue: Beware of optimism bias when predicting the future. You don't know whether economic, social and political circumstances will converge over the next decades towards such trajectory that extracting uranium from seawater and using it in nuclear reactors becomes a commercial viable enterprise.

You yourself may be confident they will, but that doesn't make it so.

>> Last-Modified Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:38:36 GMT

Yes, John McCarthy hasn't updated his web page in a while, because he's been dead for nine years. Have some respect for the man who invented Garbage Collection!

But more importantly, do you think a lot of uranium has disappeared in the last 13 years? Has the use of uranium increased by an order of magnitude in the last 13 years? Have we forgotten how to extract uranium from low grade ore in the last 13 years? No?! Then how the hell is the age of this web site (13 years) or Bernard Cohen's book (35 years) even relevant?

> My comment referred to commercial viability.

Don't move the goal posts! You specifically wrote "Uranium is finite", and the counter point is that it is practically infinite. As McCarthy points out, this doesn't even depend on seawater extraction, because low grade uranium ores (phosphate ores, later Conway granites) are plentiful.

Frankly, I'm not willing to engage with you because of the tone of your comment and how you address me.

Uranium isn't necessary. A breeder reactor could manufacture plutonium, or a thorium fueled design could be used.

Nuclear power isn't constrained by fuel scarcity at all. If anything, we have too much fissionable material.

Absolutely. I understand that there are alternatives and options. My concern isn't scarcity. It's that the confidence in those options is rooted in tenuous predictions about commercial viability in the far future.

That is, how a transition to these alternatives would conceivably integrate in and have an impact on larger market dynamics, and they way they might be either furthered or impeded by local, regional or geo-political dynamics.

and we've wasted so much of our uranium making bombs that can never be used as fuel. There is research in trying to use highly enriched uranium as a fuel source, but I doubt that will ever be a safe reality.

It's the other way around. Highly enriched uranium has been easy to use as a fuel source for decades. Using less enriched material has always been a problem, actually. CANDU (Canadian design) did a pretty good job making it work, though.

Nuclear weapons didn't use much uranium, they manufactured and processed plutonium.

By the way, a lot of nuclear fuel in the past few decades has been reprocessed material from weapons that were decommissioned. I believe the US even traded with the Russians for their spare plutonium.

Molten salt, breeder and Thorium reactors can achieve orders-of-magnitude improvements, and aren't exactly groundbreaking technology. Reprocessing as well. Several examples from decades ago, and new designs in the pipeline. The main problems are politics and lack of funding.

The Wikipedia page highlights that there's certainly discussion, doubt and controversy surrounding those technologies.

The decisive factor of change I can see here is the unproven commercial viability of alternatives at the moment as Uranium is still cheap. Whether or not those alternatives become viable once Uranium prices increase isn't easily predicted.

So, I remain highly skeptical towars claims that dismiss the issue as merely a problem of "politics and lack of funding".

Did you read the part about breeder reactors above?

You can create fuel for the SMRs via a centrally administered and controlled (to avoid nuclear proliferation) reactor, so no need to worry about uranium... in fact, it might make sense to avoid the ecological impact of uranium mining anyway.

SMRs are being developed that use other fuels, too, that are available in abundance, like Thorium:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030645491...

“Why is it that when we see nothing but progress behind, we see nothing but disaster ahead?”

> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it

... and human labor, and other chemicals. I'm not sure if you read the article, but it claims that recycling is still a somewhat tenuous economic proposition vs digging more out of the ground. This is especially true given the glut of lithium, while cobalt and other rare minerals are slowly being phased out of battery designs.

The second company described in the article claims to recycle using nothing but catalysts, and simply grinds up the used batteries in a giant vat before transportation (rendering them inert, and easier to safely move).

It sounds like their main problem at this point is continuing to scale the business to meet supply (they are already the largest lithium recycler in the US), and that the challenges there are logical, not the underlying technology.

What human labor and chemicals are you referring to?

Some amount of human labor will be required for operations, say maintenance of the in-situ automated systems, or intervention when things go wrong. These costs can't be eliminated with renewable energy, and won't be fixed with robots for some time yet (decades, minimum).

And if a mine can be automated to yield orders of magnitude more material than recycling for the same labor costs, you would need some other financial incentive (government subsidies, backroll by Tesla for marketing purposes) to make it viable.

> Lithium is a mine once, use forever resource. It's an element. It will cost energy to recycle it

It's not at all obvious to me that recycling is easy/practical. E.g. recycling the alloy from alloy steel is not done because it is too costly to separate. I'm not sure why batteries would be much different.

> It's not at all obvious to me that recycling is easy/practical.

It’s not. Other poster is just ignoring reality that it’s currently cheaper to use new lithium than to recover it.

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