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Comment by rdevsrex | Hacker News Reader

Everybody is talking about how expensive nuclear is, and how wind and solar is a much better option.

But that assumes we can actually mine all the copper, nickel, etc that we need. And do so without destroying fragile ecosystems and polluting regions where the mining is being done.

This was a great video about how dirty the copper mining in Chile is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNUbroQ2XZ4.

All I'm saying is, I don't think there are any free lunches to be had. To get off fossil fuels is going to be expensive whatever our energy mix is.

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This is some extremely muddled thinking. If, at some point, we run out of a mineral to mine, it's not like all our existing turbines stop working. They keep on working! And as they age out, critical materials can be recycled, because they don't consume fuel.

As for copper mining being dirty, you has best stop participating in any part of modern society if a dirty mine means a tech isn't acceptable, because guess what your entire life is built upon? Which is your choice, please check out and join a commune if you prefer to! But the damage there is not permanent destruction of species, it's a transformation of some finite amount of land, excluding native species, which is what communes and suburban homes and cities also do.

There is no free lunch, but there are economics lunches and there are wasteful lunches, and we should at least think clearly about these things rather than trying to make up arguments against choosing a cheaper lunch.

Grid energy storage doesn't require nickel at all. Lithium iron phosphate batteries produced at scale today do away with nickel, but they just aren't ideal for cars. There are technologies that do away with the lithium part too, but it seems like there's a new lithium discovery every few months now that we're looking, so the future is uncertain.

Copper, sure. You need copper for practically everything, though. The world has run on copper since the dawn of power generation. We may see more aluminum in power transmission at some point, but barring a breakthrough in graphene composites [1], copper will be central to the electricity sector and widely extracted regardless of technology choice.

1: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/admi.2019004...

Good thing wind and solar needs no more mining than nuclear then.

https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2022/07/the-material-fo...

We could also massively reduce energy consumption, most of the same people who like wind and solar are for that too.

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