Hacker News Reader

Comment by perihelions | Hacker News Reader

Aren't nickel salts toxic heavy metals and environmental pollutants? This is the type of battery they're deorbiting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel–hydrogen_battery ("...chemical reduction of Ni(III) into Ni(II) in the cathode")

There's a closed industrial city in Russia so heavy with nickel pollution, you can supposedly taste it,

- "“When gases are coming out of the pipes, you feel it,” says restaurant owner Eldar Aliyev. “From copper it has a sweet taste; from nickel, a different taste. Now, though, you taste it less.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/sep/15/norilsk-red-r...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norilsk

View on HN

Meteorites also have a high nickel content.

Nickel metal is benign. Oxidized nickel (II) in the salts used in battery chemistry are toxic, carcinogenic [0], and water-soluble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IARC_group_1_Carcinogens#Chemi...

Won't it ionize anyway on reentry?

Relative to the whole earth, this is an absolutely tiny amount.

"The solution to pollution is dilution."

As a point of comparison, the total amount of nickel in the Earth's oceans is approximately 1 billion tons.

OK thats a big number, but we are talking about spreading heavy elements around the atmosphere, some portion of which will end up in the soil, then in us.

Let's examine a reductio ad absurdum of a medium term future where we have 1000x more space vehicles all taking space dumps into the atmosphere. Would that be best practice? Is there a better norm we could establish today?

If de-orbiting is your concern, then I would suggest taking a step back and considering the impact on our atmosphere of increasing the number of launches.

This isn't a theoretical question. There's growing awareness among researchers that there's a need to research how the gasses and particles produced by rocket launches at scale could have an impact on the atmosphere.

https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/features/2023/rocket-polluti...

Thanks for the link. Nice use of web tech to illustrate an issue.

Scrolling on that link doesn’t work on FF, Safari or Brave on iOS.

Are you scrolling up? That caught me out for a moment.

I have JS disabled so I can scroll, but the page is long and blank. There's some text if I view source at least.

This is 2 1/2 tons, not all of it nickel. Approximately 48.5 tons of meteorites hit the earth every day https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/meteors-meteorites/ and those are around 1-1.8% nickel https://sites.wustl.edu/meteoritesite/items/metal-iron-nicke...

So, there's about 1/2 a ton of nickel falling into the atmosphere every day anyway, 180 tons a year, already in the ballpark of your thousand ships.

That's true, but wouldn't that justification work for any pollution here on earth, too?

I guess it comes down to a cost / benefit analysis?

The amount on the ISS is likely extremely tiny compared to any waste produced in the manufacturing of mass consumed goods

A very tiny amount burning up at great speeds over hundreds of thousands of square kilometers is much more diluted than anything feasible on an industrial scale

It's likely cheaper to dispose of it in a controlled environment than it is to properly dilute it across the globe. And it's impossible to check that the "dilution" won't just end up being dumping it all in a single spot in the ocean devastating ecosystems

As an argument it’s only negated by scale.

The CO2 output of a single car has little local impact and spreads throughout the atmosphere causing negligible global damage. The CO2 output of global industry has a significant impact because of the sheer volume being pumped out is enough to start affecting global temperatures. Other gases emitted by vehicles and industry can be bigger problems even on a small scale because they can concentrate in the local area.

The amount of pollutants in reentering batteries is not large enough to have an impact when diluted throughout the atmosphere. We’d need a lot more satellites for it to start becoming a major cause for concern.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com