Iran discovers world’s second largest lithium reserve
thecradle.co
thecradle.co
[1] https://innovationorigins.com/en/india-discovers-5-5-of-worl...
To put my cynic’s hat on: Having something the super powers want sounds like a great way to stop being so sanctioned. Great negotiating leverage.
Being rich in natural resources is a bit like being a really hot girl around a bunch of abusive predatory men. They'll shower her with gifts and tell her how amazing she is until she says: "no, I don't want to sleep with you" and all hell breaks loose.
examples include Saudi Arabia, Norway and Alaska. Oh no wait bad examples.
Saudi Arabia, Norway and a few Gulf min-states (Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain) are the rare counterexamples that kind of prove the rule. There's a great FT article[1] about the Iraqi man who helped lead Norway's oil revolution in the proper direction, and it was really not obvious. Why Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain managed to use their resources successfully (of course to an extent a matter of debate, human rights being a big problem in most of those places) and other dictatorships failed, even in similar scenarios (same religion, royals) is a tough one to answer.
https://www.ft.com/content/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feab...
Their economy is pretty much exclusively oil-based, very few other industries.
If you run the numbers their fund will fund current expenses for only a decade or so if oil stopped completely. Which isn't really enough time to start other industries for their citizens to have jobs.
So they're basically completely dependent on oil, with maybe a short runway for afterwards. They did not break the curse.
But my point is that the curse is that there is a stimulus to stop doing any other businesses. And it seems that Norway has largely avoided that by forcing as much oil money as possible out of the economy(oil fund)
But they are still locked into the curse - the basically is no other economy.
Norway's sovereign wealth fund is a strategy to escape the resource curse. It's like a hot girl with high self esteem and a handgun in her purse.
Alaska is one state in a country that has other things going for it. It's like a hot girl with a protective older brother.
Alaska has the Permanent Fund for much the same reason.
Sample details: https://www.texastribune.org/2017/08/21/ut-system-oil-money-...
I think 'resource curse' got it a bit backward although effect is straightforward and obvious - it allows a-holes aka bottom of society to rise, gives them extra booster rockets to rise fast (ie capture diamond mine, or oil fields like ISIL and sell via Turkey which was their primary income).
Norway got it right because well its Norway, similar would happen if it was found ie in Switzerland. Some basic human decency ingrained deep in population and thus also in politics and those who set things up for future. If that's not present and society is more everybody-for-themselves, then yes it becomes the curse and more burden than benefit.
Combine these factors and you end up with a country trapped in producing mainly only that one natural resource.
This is also why Saudi Arabia is building seemingly insane megaprojects: to lure in enough production and construction to kick start a on industry unrelated to oil.
I didn't know Alaska was a country.
I don't really know much about Norway's petrolium history, but I can't say I'm surprised that they weren't invaded for their oil, which is in the sea to begin with.
More than total lithium, I would want to know how pure it starts and what the access to water is like at any given site.
Even looking at the year-after-year increases in known lithium resources over the past decade shows massive increases.
Lithium will not be a scarce material. The only difficulty in a speedy transition is planning: deploying capital at the right places so that there's not too much mining nor too little. Making enough battery production capacity, but not too little.
There is a ton of money to be made in batteries, but there's a lot of risk due to uncertainty of size of market and timing.
Some of the the largest oil fields currently known were only discovered in the past decade or two. I wouldn't be surprised if battery materials follow a similar discovery curve.
I also believe (but could be wrong), that a not insignificant amount of the success of oil alternatives today (which helps to slow demand growth) is due to a flurry of research that started with the price shocks of the 70s that were definitely not due solely to supply-demand issues.
In that framing, peak oil happened - we just proceeded to reframe reality around a substitute and choked down a decade of stagnation in the energy economy.
Petroleum reserves are basically tsr sands and fracking which is low EROEI, even with the industry externalizing costs like methane leakage, vast freshwater consumption / pollution.
For example it used to be you burned a barrel of oil to get 20 or 30 out back in the easily accessible light sweet crude days.
Shit like the tar sands is more like 2:1 EROEI.
All those people complaining about EROEI no longer seem to have the slightest concern, despite it being a significant hurdle for future fossil fuel use.
And the EROEIs get even worse if any sane carbon taxation / sequestration costs are applied, if any widespread damage from fracking is charged (as in set-your-tapwater-on-fire stories), or the horrific environmental destruction of tar sands (which use ungodly amounts of freshwater to try to get the oil out of the mined sands).
I guess that claimed EROEI on fracking is 5-10x. No idea what it is like in practice, I assume there should be a distribution that could be analyzed.
Tar sands peak at 5x, and I bet that is only in the best case. Why tar sands is still a thing, does any Canadian know? Is this because oil/gas has penetrated the Canadian government lobby and made it too big to fail?
You're almost certainly onto something here. Much like why water cooled nuclear reactors are still a thing, despite molten salt reactors having been around for about 60 years (as in, before any of those water cooled reactors melted down with a catastrophic hydrogen explosion, caused by you know, all that water).
We don't have an energy shortage. We have political obstructionism.
"True cost of using wind and solar to meet demand was $272 and $472 per MWh"
https://web.archive.org/web/20220916003958/https://files.ame...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1088739/global-oil-disco...
Interesting I see an opposite trend but that's a 7 year window. AFAIK discoveries are slowing and the general trend is for newly discovered fields to have lower returns on energy.
Lithium become abundant, no way. Not with the amounts we're using up per capita and the enormous population on this planet. the green revolution is just getting started and there's definitely not enough to go around.
Combining these numbers, Tesla's 1.3 * 10^6 battery packs shipped in 2022 would have taken 7.93 * 10^21 joules to manufacture. This is more than 10 times annual global energy production and is clearly in error.
Another way to spot-check and reject this number is to note that 3 million barrels of oil would cost in the neighborhood of $240 million. Getting that much energy from coal might cost only $75 million per vehicle but it's still a proposition that would see Tesla losing approximately $100 trillion dollars per year on sales of 1.3 million vehicles.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/02/investing/tesla-deliveries-pr...
[2] https://www.ocean.washington.edu/courses/envir215/energynumb...
[3] https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/c...
Presumably, they don't stop being lithium after 8-10 years.
Batteries last far longer than 8-10 years, I'm not sure where you are getting that bad number. But even if you were right, our very first attempts at recycling already recover 95% of input metals:
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/03/heres-what-redwood-lear...
And every year we discover massive new amounts of lithium resources, because until the mid 2010s, nobody really bothered to look for lithium.
FUD about amounts of lithium should be abandoned as a stall tactic; they no longer pass basic sniff tests arms are easily shut down hard. Other stall FUD needs to be invented if the energy interchange is to be stopped.
The problem with lithium is not finding a resource, but doing the necessary chemical process to get it to be battery quality lithium. Lithium is not like base metal mining at all. Lithium is more like a specialty chemical, each resources and purification process has to get separately designed, and has to be individually verified by each battery (or battery materials company).
There are only very, very few companies who actually sell battery grade lithium, and lots of junior minors with lots of lithium in the ground and very little chance of developing it.
Iran will not be developing its own battery grade lithium anytime soon, no matter how large their resource.
China and Iran aren't friends, but of course China is willing to trade with them, and they might mine some lithium, but the refining would be done in China. No way will China give Iran what it needs for its own lithium industry. Maybe if Iran really pays for a lot for it, but even then, this would be a very long process.
1: https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blexplainer/the-lithium...
Lithium production is important but lithium is not the next oil. It’s not going to dominate the world economy. There aren’t going to be wars fought over it. And we will ultimately extract plenty of it to build EVs.
The largest producers are Australia and Chile.
https://themeghalayan.com/china-controls-70-of-global-lithiu...
Just because it’s called “refining” doesn’t mean that lithium refining is anywhere near as complex as oil refining.
The component of the oil analogy that does correlate is the fact that oil refineries are generally situated close to where the end products are consumed. Which in the case of lithium is batteries, the production of which is indeed largely sited in China as well.
That is to say, China doesn’t control the supply of lithium, rather they control the supply chain of lithium based goods.
That may seem like a minor difference, but the resolution to that is categorically different.
Of note: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/tesla-lith...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021%E2%80%932022_Iranian_prot...
With zero external influence, I bet ;)
It wouldn't be the first time [1][2][3]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_intervention_in_Libya...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_involvement_in_the_Ven...
> There is some truth to this insistence. But it is mostly disingenuous. The Constitution was meant to foster a complex form of majority rule, not enable minority rule.
Forming the United States also took a lot of compromise. If nobody was willing to budge on these archaic issues we wouldn't be here today. It doesn't change the vision that all men are created equal and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
"I don't like where this is going so I'll just arbitrarily disqualify the line of argument even though it's logically valid."
> Situation in Syria or "democratic" Iraq is probably more illustrative
Cynicism is a hinder to progress. Reality is messy, but if we tell people to stop aspiring, things can only get worse. Tunisia after the revolution has had its problems but it's still freer than it was, for example; same for Algeria. Chances are even going from a theocracy to a secular dictatorship on the Egyptian model, for example, would be a significant step forward.
They are often externally helped, but considering the casus "belli" in this case was an extremely natural one (a popular reaction against a brutal abuse of power that resulted in the violent murder of a woman for not properly wearing the mandated veil), it's very doubtful the protests were started by foreign-affiliated/financed parties.
Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, Iran has a long and recent history of being a highly orderly society.
How democratic it would be is another question, but very likely it at least is not going to be as oppressive. Even if the resulting state were closer to Singapore than to Switzerland, it would still be a serious relief for the population.
Since then, Iraq was controlled by various foreign powers, as a colony: partly Persian, partly Ottoman / Turkish; since late 19th century, it was increasingly under British control, and since 1970s, under Saddam Hussein: independent but rather undemocratic.
Iran was independent and powerful since 1500s, and it even converted the previous waves of invaders to its culture (somehow similar how the Manchu invaders gradually converted to the Chinese culture). While obviously not democratic, Iran was not a cultural backwater, up until the Islamic revolution in 1979. Even under the power of ayatollahs Iran's urban societies feature strong citizen movements demanding more liberty and equality, e.g. women equality: women had much more rights under the last Shah regime, and people remember that.
In general, I suppose that Iran, had the current theocratic regime been overthrown, would not turn into a failed state, much like Russia hasn't become a failed state after the Communist regime fell. (Regarding perspectives of EU / US-style liberal democracy there, I'm much less certain, though chances are.)
If "liberation" were viable, the USA would have probably already attempted it.
Extracting it isn't really the problem, it's literally bubbling up to the surface in the form of mud. The water is just needed for dilution as part of separation.
https://gdil.org/behind-the-veil-the-marketing-of-iranian-st...
That doesn't mean it's false. Just read it with healthy scepticism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_opinion_in_the_United...
The hardest part of my job is connecting Iraq to 9/11 - Bush
Millions of Americans protested the Iraq war[0]. Globally it resulted in the largest protests in the world at that time. It didn't matter.
Of course you're correct about the zeitgeist of the US at the time, the government, the media and the American right were pro-war and they controlled the narrative. And I have to concede in hindsight there have been times where popular collective action has been effective, just never against starting a war AFAIK. When the US decides it wants a war it seems like there's really nothing anyone can do about it.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
These are reddit quality comments that don't belong here.
It's called history
there's nothing strange about a country going to war over a resource. Has been happening for a long time in history, and there's no reason that anything in the modern world changed human nature.
Except that lithium isn't valuable enough to go to war over at the moment.
Now, the threat of being able to develop and fire nukes, on the other hand, is something that might be war-worthy.
That doesn't make it any less sickening. War is always a travesty.
America's postwar boom years resulted in a hegemon that largely avoided conflict. Now that power is more widely distributed amongst peer competitors, we're going to see the resource hungry animals we evolved as come to the forefront. There will be a great deal of contention, and some of it will be heated.
If I had to bet, we'll see more war this century than in the last. Ukraine is just a harbinger of what's to come.
We've already had news cycles normalizing the debate over tactical nukes on the battlefield.
I'm sorry but this ignores the history. Vast swathes of Africa, Latin America and Asia were in conflicts and turmoil, sometimes due to the same hegemon and her allies. The only region that was mostly conflict free in the post WW2 era was Europe and North America.
By contrast about 3% of all humans alive were killed in WW2, over 6 years. 3% doesn't sound too bad, so let's contextualize that. In the United States alone that would be more than 10 million people. That's about 4,620 people killed every single day for 6 years. The amount of suffering that actual war brings is something almost none of us living today in the West can even begin to imagine. I mean can you imagine multiple 9/11 scale events, every single day, for almost 2200 days?
Being honest, I actually had to double check my math because my god that's just an unimaginably vast amount of suffering and death. And WW3 will almost certainly be vastly worse because the first bloc to start losing is going to go nuclear - which will result in a comparable response from the other bloc. This whole hegemony thing has really got to end, or we as a species are going to end.
I didn’t read that in their comment, and since I’m not American I assumed that they are talking about the world. Everyone knows USA is a hegemon in a global sense and not a regional sense. The past 70 years were not some conflict free utopia for rest of the world.
But I agree with your general point that we need to avoid further conflicts else we’re doomed.
Fixed that for you
No it isn't. The US helped plenty of bad regimens get their hands on nuclear weapons and did nothing to prevent it. In fact, if its about nukes, then maybe Israel is the clear problem. They are non signatory to the NPT and almost certainty have secret nukes (likely developed partly with stolen data from the US). So if a 'thread of war' is appropriate, Israel should be the target, not Iran.
Iran on the other hand is a signatory to the NPT, they also have never attempted to develop nuclear weapons. Their program was always monitored under the NPT. A bunch of fake evidence for nuclear weapons was 'discovered' on a laptop in Egypt by Mossad. This evidence was widely reject by literally everybody outside of the Mossad, including the CIA. The whole global intelligence community agree, Iran wasn't developing nuclear weapons.
That didn't stop Israel right-wing to try to use it to get the US to attack Iran for them over it. According to them, Iran is 'one year away from nukes' literally since 1990 so this was just the latest in a long series of such claims.
Iran was not even developing its own enrichment, they had a deal with France to handle the fuel production and France would be responsible for monitoring and taking the nuclear waste back to France. This deal was then killed by the US (Bush) who basically threatened sanction on France. Only in response to that did Iran set up enrichment facilities.
This was then used around 2008-2010 to start a panic about Iran nuclear weapons in a blatant attempt to repeat the Iraq war against Iran. All the right wing think-thanks (with lots of money from Israel, Ratheon and Loockeed and friends) were busy publishing mostly fake nonsense base on manufactured evidence to push the narrative. Thankfully everybody was sick of that shit because of Iraq.
This lead to Obama years of extreme pressure and results in Iran implementing a monitoring regime specially developed just for Iran just they could prove that they were not developing nuclear weapons. Of course all that didn't stop Trump from instantly leaving the deal.
War with Iran is literally an insane concept. Like delusional level of insanity. Even if they developed nuclear weapons, it would be insane to go to war over them. Its a nation with 90 million people, horrible geography and the ability to blockade the most important oil export route in the world.
Of course it’s hard to say what course history would have taken without this but I fail to see how the current theocracy / securocracy could have had a foothold without it (revolutions always just swap elites).
How long will people continue to pretend the entire modern history of Iran is the deterministic result of Western actions? That in the Shah and even in the Revolution, Iran possesses no agency of its own, a passive object only of Western force?
But to the point: there is absolutely zero chance of the US going to war to secure lithium reserves. And that is leaving aside, in the first place, the fact we are on the cusp of a Li->Na transition. It is the laziest kind of armchair commentary, pattern matching ("foreign country", "resource", "America liberate") with zero grounding in reality.
I believe generally several characteristics of the Shah's regime are held to have laid ground for the revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution#Background_...
So it's not about robbing Iranians of agency (who are among the most distinguished and ancient cultures), just stating that 1953 meddling gave rise to a regime that possessed these characteristics, and without the coup, different dynamics would have been at play.
I totally agree, there is zero chance of war over lithium.
Could? This article title implies they have, but the text implies they are searching still and have not actually found it.
Technically this makes it a "resource" (ie. guesstimate) rather than a "reserve" (drill mapped with a solid plan on extraction methods, costs, estimated profits etc. to a JORC (or equiv) standard).
The problem was no-one wants to extract it for the bare minimum prices it will produce.
Exact same fallacy as with oil, ie. in the US it's only profitable to frack when the price per barrel is fetching more than $50
And besides that Lithium is even harder to transport than oil is. You need blue team to occupy the mines and secure a perimeter so that red team cannot disrupt not only extraction but also transportation to the nearest port.
But it's bad enough that he'd want to be involved in a coup.
He deleted the tweet as soon as his ambien/amphetamine cocktail (or whatever tf he's been on lately) wore off.
Bolivia doesn't really have a serious lithium industry and they are and were a long way away from having it. The whole idea that any of this has to do with lithium is just a lie made up by Bolivan politicians to play on the old (true) stereotypes. And it clearly worked, that story always sells well and of course the American leftist picked it up and just ran with it, weather true or not.
Musk or Tesla has literally 0 reason why they should be interested in Boliva. They have never before or after had any interest in Boliva. Boliva is not special, its just one of many place that have lithium and have politicians making a bigger deal about it then it actually is. Musk has been telling people for 20 years now that lithium is plentiful and that anybody who thinks it isn't, is a fucking idiot.
This is just on of those stories where a bunch of fake claims, and few jokes (or comments in bad taste) lead to a one of these viral stories that since then has been taking on a mythical status ever expanding status. To the point where I read people actually believing Musk himself was basically organizing the coup himself (amazing that he can lead multiple companies and overthrow governments at the same time).
But instead of lack of workers or technical know-how it's the pollution produced.
How much is "resource poverty" a matter of low resource concentration vs (exploration)-absence?
How do the economics change with changing energy and labor prices?
What is the relationship between resources and the building of infrastructure, in terms of logistics and also permanent settling?
Are many extraction and refining methods monopolized through patents or other mechanisms?
So yeah... who know what they're denying now, and what we'll find out in 60 years
UPDATE: more information makes its way onto the internet over time, and while I've done searches on him in the past, this tidbit is now available via Google that wasn't before; he was "Director of Relief for the American Persian Relief Commission in Teheran, Iran in 1919" and I guess he was still involved there when the Shah took over and they developed some sort of relationship.
He was one of the insiders in the world trade system.
Oh how I love irony, though I suspect our geopolitical rivals don't share my sentiments.
Take Iran. The US and several others sanctioned them over trying to develop nuclear weapons. Iran stopped the weapons program, agreed to inspections to verify compliance, and the sanctions were lifted.
Then the US put back sanctions for domestic political reasons, and so now when Iran does something the US does not like (such as supplying Russia with weapons to use against Ukraine), the US doesn't really have a way to deal with that because (1) they've already got Iran nearly maximally sanctioned, and (2) even if they could find something else to sanction Iran over there is no reason for Iran to believe that changing their behavior would lead to removal of that sanction.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Comprehensive_Plan_of_Ac...
It would probably be better to help the countries that have a combination of high per capita emissions and large populations that are being slow about transitioning.
For example, suppose we wanted to cut total CO2 emissions by 2.5 billion tons of CO2. There are 3 countries that could in theory cut their emissions by that amount: China, US, and India.
For China to do that, they would need to cut back to where they are similar to Spain, Italy, or Great Britain when it comes to how green their energy sources are and how much of what they do depends on emitting CO2.
For the US to cut CO2 emissions by 2.5 billion tons of CO2, we'd have to cut back to where we are where China is now on green energy and processes. That's how far the US is behind in transitioning. (Largely because the US is the only high emitting large population first world country that regularly changes its mind about whether or not there is any need to transition). (There are countries way farther behind like Qatar and Kuwait, but their populations are small enough that it doesn't really matter at this stage).
For India to cut 2.5 billion tons of CO2 they would pretty much have to stop doing anything that emits CO2 because their total emissions are just a bit over 2.5 billion tons.
There is plenty of lithium in the ground in the US if that is what you are interested in. Or Australia, or many other places.
And anyway, there is basically zero battery materials production in the US anyway, that is all in China, Korea and Japan.
But not too excited.
You’re pleading your ignorance. The Cradle is Iranian state media.
Too improbable for a fictional movie, but here we are. Life, as always, is stranger than fiction.
Turkey had a great position controlling access to the Black Sea during a major conflict, then Earthquakes happened. Given the oil and Americans in the region, I wonder if they are fracking....
Fracking does not and cannot cause large, deep earthquakes like the one recently in Turkey, in which plates significantly move in respect to each other.
They can cause very shallow, weak earthquakes, where the top of earth's crust slightly moves.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/2019-year-fracking-earthq...:
“The Feb. 25 earthquake was only a magnitude 4.9, which would not traditionally be considered very dangerous. But it was able to destroy older and more vulnerable buildings because it was so close to the surface -- only about one kilometer deep according to the new study”
but it isnt though, if it was, it would be happening all over, without massive subsidies and strongarming from government.
None of this is to say that solar power is bad, just that we should have measured expectations.
Oh and we can only capture 20-30 % of the energy of the total light.
We're going to need solar power, and fossile fuel is madness. But to deny that solar power is not 'dense' seems irrational.
Compare the amount of land needed to power the US with solar to the amount we use to brew a small amount of ethanol as a minor energy sourced. We can completely power the US with a fraction of the land that we currently use as a subsidy for corn farmers, who grow more corn than we can eat.
Then include that any solar panels feeding variable load can go wherever (like roofs and parking lots) and take no land but instead enhance the other use.
Then include tilting agrivoltaics (which increases yield for heat sensitive crops and makes animals healthier).
Dedicated utility PV in a good area has a higher area energy density than any scalable power source except gas. Include dual use and it has the lowest land impact worldwide. Specific power is pretty damn good too, about 20W/kg (or 5-8W/kg net, so slightly better than nuclear).
You're welcome to include mining for the entire supply chain of solar and exclude the supply chain of the generator for thermal though, it doesn't change how one sided the land use is in solar's favour.
"All of which except silver outmass minerals of similar rarity and mining impact in the solar panel (and that is quickly changing)" Nuclear reactors require relatively small inputs of these metals compared to the metals used in solar panels, and the huge capital invested in making solar panels less resource-intensive could also be applied to nuclear, if we wanted to do so.
"Even then it's questionable because most of the nuclear reactor cannot be recycled, but the solar panel legally must have recycling prepaid in many jurisdictions." But again, reactors are small compared to the millions of panels that are necessary to be the equivalent of one plant, and furthermore plenty of those materials can be and are recycled, especially in France (the entire history of the American nuclear energy program have created less waste than solar panels have in just a couple decades). And, again, innovations that make solar panels more recyclable (which we absolutely need because right now they mostly just produce massive amounts of toxic waste) could also be invested in nuclear recycling. I did get a good chuckle out of your vague "many jurisdictions" though.
Solar panels aren't made of lithium.
> Nuclear reactors require relatively small inputs of these metals compared to the metals used in solar panels, and the huge capital invested in making solar panels less resource-intensive could also be applied to nuclear, if we wanted to do so.
[Citation needed] Solar panels don't need tonnes of indium per GW or gadoliunium or an ongoing 100kg of copper per MW per year. Modern panels on a modern racking system have a higher capacity weighted specific power than an EPR and a lower metal fraction. The cells (which are still over 90% silicon) are only about 2% of the total mass of a module and weigh less than the raw uranium for an equal energy output, let alone the rest of the reactor and supply chain.
That last is just more lies. All of the solar panels ever produced could fit in the tailings pit of Husab dug out for a single year of operation. Half of the US dragging their feet doesn't discount the fact that most new PV in the civilized world is recyclable and mandatory to do so.
Do you have anything honest to say or just the same slimy lies?
Nuclear reactors use less copper overall than renewable energy sources. (https://help.leonardo-energy.org/hc/en-us/articles/360010919...) Uranium, by the way, is also recycleable--most fissile material can be reused, and the amount of waste produced is tiny.
And yes, the total amount of waste produced by nuclear energy is miniscule, and could fit in a much smaller amount of space than is taken up by solar panel waste, which is well over a quarter of a million metric tons. Both are small compared to, say, coal ash, but solar disposal does have significant costs and can and does produce significant waste.
And one last thing--you're hypersensitive and pathetic. I started this discussion agreeing with your main point and trying to observe something straightforwardly relevant and you've been having a tantrum in response the entire time. Log off.
> And yes, the total amount of waste produced by nuclear energy is miniscule, and could fit in a much smaller amount of space than is taken up by solar panel waste, which is well over a quarter of a million metric tons. Both are small compared to, say, coal ash, but solar disposal does have significant costs and can and does produce significant waste.
Again. Compare for me the volume of the tailings pit of a typical open pit uranium mine like Husab with the volume of every solar panel ever produced. A few hundred grams of metal encased in glass for an entire lifetime of energy is not 'significant waste'.
> And one last thing--you're hypersensitive and pathetic. I started this discussion agreeing with your main point and trying to observe something straightforwardly relevant and you've been having a tantrum in response the entire time. Log off.
Projection much? You tried to push lies and propaganda, now you're having a tantrum when challenged. Every topic where nuclear shilling isn't immediately banned is full of the same set of talking points that have been debunked between years and decades ago.
A fuel rod assembly with 500kg of uranium produces about 200,000,000 kwH over its lifetime (https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazi...), which comes out to 400k kw per kilogram of uranium, or 400 kw per gram. The amount of rare earths in each solar panel may be relatively low, but it also uses a significant amount of silicon, which as a metalloid has to be mined. Beyond that, none of this even addresses the differences in intensity of production; because nuclear produces its lifetime energy much more quickly than a solar panel does, the relative density of solar that you need in order to provide a comparable level of power over time is considerably unbalanced.
"Again. Compare for me the volume of the tailings pit of a typical open pit uranium mine like Husab with the volume of every solar panel ever produced. A few hundred grams of metal encased in glass for an entire lifetime of energy is not 'significant waste'." I'm at a loss for how to explain to you that this a fallacy on your part. I'm talking about waste production, and you're trying to compare apples to oranges by bringing up uranium mines instead of comparing waste production of the different methods. That you're so intent on repeating this obvious fallacy suggests to me that it's the best you can do. I'd like to say it doesn't matter, but the anti-rational fanaticism of green energy cultists is going to push the world off a cliff.
You can't even distinguish between energy and power, now you're mixing kw and kWh. A reactor with about 100t of fuel rods produces around 1GW and refuels every 3-6 years. Ergo 100g of refined uranium (plus zirconium and gadolinium, then caesium indium and silver for control rods).
The toxic slurry in a uranium mine is waste from producing energy. It outmasses everything else you are talking about combined by orders of magnitude and is rarely dealt with in any permanent or safe way, see the Indian village of Kadapa or any of the mines in Niger or Uzbekistan for examples.
Then bringing up the most abundant element on earth as if mining it is a relevant impact is another huge stretch. Quartz mining doesn't even need the same grade of sand as concrete. What an utterly intellectually bankrupt claim.
You're the one trying to concern troll over the space and minerals used by PV. Demonstrate that the total land use and mining impact of the entire supply chain is actually higher.
I also note you've cherry picked a report that talks largely about vehicle batteries but tangentially mentions thin film panels (an obsolete technology being abandoned) rather than monocrystalline, and then doesn't quantify it per MW (hint: the numbers in it are nowhere near your claimed 4t/MW). Where is all this copper supposed to be? You're claiming that there's 100kg of copper hiding in this photo https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/wp-content/uploads/201...
You're very narrowly trying to compare SNF with the entire solar module, ignoring the reactor, the upstream fuel supply, the low level waste, and the waste containment. The sheer stupidity of thinking you have a coherent enough lie is mind boggling.
https://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/inst... - page 25
160 acres are 1x1.6 kilometers. That should give about 150 MW during the day.
(Same as power consumption of 50 000 aircons.)
These are mostly generic tax reductions for energy, and would apply equally to solar or any other energy source.
For example in the UK, "fuel and power for domestic use" is subject to the reduced VAT rate of 5%, instead of the standard rate of 20% charged for most items.
This is the kind of thing that gets labelled a "fossil fuel subsidy".
Utilities are slow. And not so bright. They are using old technology that hasn't changed for decades, has reached its peak, and doesn't advance. Utilities are conservative.
If something new comes out and is better, it's going to take them a decade to even realize what's happening. Then it's going to take decades for the old multi-decade existing equipment to age out.
And if the technology is cheaper, there's a very good chance that utilities will heavily resist providing cheaper electricity because in many markets they are regulated monopolies, with a fixed rate of profit. Cheaper energy prices mean less profit.
In reality, solar is cheaper energy today. Providing 99% of our energy by solar, wind, geothermal, and storage is cheaper than our current energy mix in California:
https://energycentral.com/c/cp/our-path-247-renewable-energy...
And nationwide in the US, it's cheaper to shut down a paid-for coal plant and replace it with solar than to continue buying fuel:
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30012023/wind-solar-coal-...
And year after year, solar, wind, and storage get cheaper, and we have not yet reached the inflection point of the logistic curve yet. The genera form of Moore's law is Wright's law, and it applies to renewable energies, and is no longer in effect for fossil fuel tech.
If you think that solar doesn't work fantastically in Nebraska, then I think you need to reevaluate the data, and start holding your utility to account.
Solar works great in Minnesota, with lower solar resources than Nebraska. The key difference is whether the utility will allow a financially beneficial decision to made, not the fundamental economics of the technology.
Contrast the planned 2023 solar additions in yellow dots on this map:
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818
With the amount of solar insolation (note that the color gradient only spans a ~30-40% overall difference, too):
https://www.nrel.gov/gis/assets/images/solar-annual-ghi-2018...
So while you are right that utilities are slow, which was the main thrust of my original comment, we must also acknowledge the financial incentives of utilities to distort a setup that can not even result be called a market.
Electricity decisions are made based on what the utility perceives will give it the greatest profit, with all their biases, and without regard to what will deliver the best overall cost-optimal solution for reliable power.
As for distortions the biggest problem with retail users is that panels have changed the market but people still expect to use the old rules. Eg be self sufficient 320 days a year but expect eletricity on demand at the same low rates on the few days they need the grid. That isn't scalable and home solar people are getting an unfair advantage from the system, which is why utilities (rightfully) dont like it.
Cold wonders are not a reason to avoid solar. Look at where they are getting installed around the north east and the Great Lakes. They will laugh at your Nebraska winters.
It’s the curse of natural resources.
When you have “the stuff” you feel like you don’t need to talk to others, spending time and human resources on talks and diplomatic relationships.
In the context of global politics, military and intelligence where everyone’s ego is all the way up their ass, not wanting to talk is interpreted as disrespect and hostility. And so tension ensues, add the language barrier, culture barrier etc. and pretty soon you are stuck with the old USvTHEM
Another country similar to that is Venezuela, they too have plenty of fossil fuels and sun and lithium.
It would be easy to see that garden as a gift from god after you’ve seen everyone else freeze to death. Then you just need a reason to leave e.g overhunting or overpopulation or some dispute.
Then the myth would be that someone living there did something and our group had to leave paradise and go into the thawing wasteland. Pass that on for generation after generation and it becomes metaphorical.
> "Paleoclimate and archaeological evidence tells us that, 11,000-5,000 years ago, the Earth's slow orbital 'wobble' transformed today's Sahara desert to a land covered with vegetation and lakes."
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/green-saha...
If you're referencing the likely near-extinction of humans ~74,000 years ago, it's not clear anyone in the relatively recent past would have remembered that:
And if you build on electric trains and trams, rather then EV you can likely reduce the amount of lithium a society needs by 80%.
but to be fair, calling Iran a desert is like calling the United States a desert.
<Iranian Rick>: "I'M PERSIAN, MOTHERFUCKEEEEERS!" destroys the prison and flies away
The climate map shows how it is comparable to the most desert regions of the United States, such as Arizona, New Mexico, or Nevada.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Iran#/media/Fil...
Vs
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/Koppen-G...
Virtually the entire country is arid / steppe except for a few tiny strips, where the (beautiful) videos you shared were taken.
Contrasted with the United States which does have a lot of arid space (30%?) but is dominated by temperate climates. Not even including Alaska. Your claim that Iran is comparable to the United States in that respect is just totally wild lol
[0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-pursues-afghanistans-mine...
[1]https://thegeopolitics.com/chinas-540-million-energy-deal-wi...
I think you are being rather naive that the Chinese won't simply bribe the right people and any benefit from the extraction actually reaches the Afghan people or increases their GDP in any meaningful way.
They can try anyhow, who knows how well that will go. Might be their turn to get stuck in a quagmire over there.
China will find Afghanistan just as useless as the US and literally every other empire for 5000 years.
> Life, as always, is stranger than fiction.
No it isn't. Lithium is very, very common. Pretty much every large country will find plenty of lithium if they go look for it. There is plenty in the US, plenty in China, plenty in Australia and so on and so on.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200726004948/https://twitter.c...
Don't be surprised if something similar happens here. Unless, of course, Iran's government is willing to play ball.
Having said that, up until now Western governments have largely ignored the plight of the Iranian people, leaving them to fend for themselves.
If this isn't fake news and the lithium deposit is real and then suddenly Western governments become interested in helping the Iranian people, it won't be because of some kind of altruism. It will be to get easier access to the resources.
It's still a good outcome, but if it happens I don't think it will have came from the good will of western governments.
s/ lithium / oil /
.. and now we're looking at the 1953 Iranian coup d'état in which the US and UK deposed a democratically elected government to prevent them poking into the details of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) and exposing the degree to which Western goverments were "helping" the Iranian people (err, sorry, themselves) with resource royalties.
That led to 25 years of despised western puppet government and an eventual overthrow that over compansated and lurched backwards into theocracy .. leading to today.
Great timing guys.
as to coal plants, there is none.
Since almost all power grids use a mix of fossil fuels and carbon-free sources, the actual numbers are much better than that worst case.
That is the worst case scenario however. Most places in the developed world only get a percentage of their power from coal, and over the lifecycle of the vehicle, that percentage is set to reduce. It makes little sense to take about the state of the world today, when a new vehicle is expected to be on the road for multiple decades.
Your talking points are tired and not helpful. This is a transition that needs to happen. There are better critiques to be made.
We can trust you're a "real person" just as much as you, us. Diverting critiques on the basis of "astroturfing" is so HRC '16.
And yet regardless of how poorly it was treated or "what is fair", which is all the whining is ever about, nobody can remotely come up with a reason for why Iran getting a nuclear weapon would be a positive development for anybody.
This is a dangerous game, regardless of your politics.
Astroturfing does not necessarily imply bots, comrade.
Nuclear weapons deter invasions.
Whether it's a positive or negative development really doesn't matter. What matters is what actually happens once that occurs.
When India and Pakistan developed and tested nuclear weapons, we didn't see proliferation or development of nuclear capability in the region. Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Thailand, etc. didn't start their own nuclear programs.
So in the event Iran gets nuclear weapons, it's likely nothing of consequence will happen.
Whether the domino theory is at play depends on the balance of power and specifics of each geopolitical region. It simply doesn't follow that because India-Pakistan was contained such a thing won't happen in the Middle East.
In fact you'd notice that is a pair. The counterparty to Iran having a nuke would be Saudi Arabia having a nuke, an extremely likely outcome.
> In fact you'd notice that is a pair. The counterparty to Iran having a nuke would be Saudi Arabia having a nuke, an extremely likely outcome.
Israel already has them and has had them for some time. Just like India did before Pakistan developed and tested them.
Both hostile reactive (Pakistan against India) and (at least semi-)cooperative (Pakistan, or at least AQ Khan as a rogue actor, to other states) proliferation occurred as a result of the Indian and then Pakistani nuclear programs.
When India did it, it did lead to proliferation, specifically, in Pakistan. Pakistan’s program lead to (as well as their own bomb) proliferation through the AQ Khan network (to North Korea, as well as several states that never, at leadt yet, tested a weapon.) Myanmar also appears to have had a nuclear weapons program in the 00s, with assistsance from North Korea, which may or may not have since been abandoned.
Similarly, Israel's program contributed to the motivation for Iran's and Syria's programs (reactive [both of which appear to have also gotten cooperative aid from the Khan network and/or North Korea, which circles back to India/Pakistan]) and to technology for South Africa’s nuclear weapons (cooperative).
And, in the end, neither of them has used those weapons offensively or defensively in close to 50 years (25 years for Pakistan).
> Myanmar also appears to have had a nuclear weapons program in the 00s, with assistsance from North Korea, which may or may not have since been abandoned.
Yet they haven't advertised it or tried to use them (if they ever had them) in any capacity. As for North Korea, while they do test missiles on occasion, they have not made use of any nuclear capability against another country.
> Similarly, Israel's program contributed to the motivation for Iran's and Syria's programs (reactive [both of which appear to have also gotten cooperative aid from the Khan network and/or North Korea, which circles back to India/Pakistan]) and to technology for South Africa’s nuclear weapons (cooperative).
Yet, all the focus is on Iran in terms of sanctions and fear/warmongering about them developing nuclear capability. Every single example in the past has shown that developing such capability has not resulted in any type of nuclear conflict.
The goalposts moved pretty quickly from the original wildly false claim that their programs did not contribute to further proliferation in the region, to something like “well, neither they nor the states in the area of further proliferarion they contributed to have, to date, used nukes in anger, so it doesn't matter”.
I would suggest that waiting until after a nuclear war to take proliferation concerns seriously is... not a great idea.
My original claim was that nuclear weapons did not proliferate in the region beyond India and Pakistan (and there was a 24 year gap between India's and Pakistan's first nuclear tests). You claimed that:
>>> Myanmar also appears to have had a nuclear weapons program in the 00s, with assistsance from North Korea, which may or may not have since been abandoned.
But this wikipedia page[1] does not mention anything like that. Do you have a source for your claim?
> I would suggest that waiting until after a nuclear war
Again, this has not happened so far, and it doesn't look like the probability of that happening will change regardless of whether or not Iran has a nuclear weapons program.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_and_weapons_of_mass_de...
I don't see how a sane person thinks Iran getting the bomb is a good development or viable.
Just like with Iraq; wmd’s, weapons inspectors etc. are ultimately just a side show.
IAEA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Energy_Ag...), France, Germany, UK, all are sounding the alarm.
So, exactly the same as Iraq?
Would want to invade countries on the other side of the globe for "security".
Super powers gonna super power and the rest of have to pretend to care.
Any sources on how? Have they declared that they will attack another country with nuclear weapons? Or it is simply them suddenly becoming immune from invasions / attacks?
What resulted in all this was that Ukraine was negotiating a very favorable trade deal with the EU. They had a presidential election, which was won by a guy who promised to be friendly with Russia, but also push through the trade deal. Only, when the trade deal was almost done, Putin called him, they talked for several hours, and at the end he declared that he was shutting down the deal, and would make one with Russia instead.
This was extraordinarily unpopular, because the terms of the EU deal allowed for Ukrainians to work as guest workers in EU. Doing that, you could earn more in three months doing unskilled labor than you could expect to earn in Ukraine with a degree in a year. Russia had nothing similar to offer. Because of this, there were massive protests. Then the president ordered troops to fire on the protests, and the protests escalated enough that the president fled. After that, Russia invaded Crimea and Donbass.
Two thirds of Ukrainians opposed NATO membership in 2013. Support only became a thing when there already were Russian troops in Ukraine.
And look at those who actually developed nuclear weapons and ensured they have a strong defense deterrent (such as North Korea).
You're looking at it with a very north-atlantic centred perspective.
So? You say that like it is a bad thing.
I didn't say Iran is completely illogical in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. The comparison to North Korea is most apt. I don't want another North Korea situation, one is enough thanks. This one would be worse.
Why? Because Saudi Arabia and Egypt and others will then likely decide they have to get nuclear weapons too. I don't care about "fair", I want fewer countries with nuclear weapons not more - for obvious reasons.
Its a perfectly rational course of action, no nuclear armed nation has ever been invaded and subjugated.
If i ran a country building or acquiring a nuke would be top of my "To-do" list.
It's zealotry all the way down, whether you explicitly name your god or not. The only irrational thing here is to claim moral superiority based off something as superficial as a particular religion.
Will China/Russia/USA give up theirs or do they see them as essential for "national security"?
And if they are essential then what moral authority do they have to deny security to others?
moral authority is only a talking point; a feint veil over the actual truth. Which is that the nuclear powers do not want more nuclear powers, lest those that aren't allies strong arm using nuclear blackmail (against, let's say, the USA's interests).
And tbh, i think ignoring moral authority, or "justice" or "peace", and talking about the truth, makes more sense.
Logic dictates we disarm them first and see how the rest plays out =)
God works in mysterious ways?
That's the thing with non-proliferation that doesn't really sit right with me, it kind of goes against human knowledge and progress. You have to have a smaller group of people ban certain kinds of knowledge from the rest of humans, and be demonstrably willing to use violence to enforce that, otherwise anyone with enough determination will eventually figure it out. Even when there was somewhat of a consensus on how to deal with that during the Cold War, a bunch of countries slipped through the non-proliferation but everyone pretended like it's ok. Now that there is less consensus on anything in this world, how will this system work going forward?
Some Americans don't like the influence of Iran's mullahs, but the UK and US supported the mullahs and Shah in 1953 when the secular prime Minister Mossadegh wanted to nationalize Iran's oil. The US backed the Shah and mullahs and SAVAK's brutal campaign against Iran's secular left into the 1970s. Then Iranians turned against the Shah and US imperial influence and here we are.