-
Posts
2,439 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
215
efaardvark's Achievements
Single Status Update
-
I have to wonder if Putin would still have invaded Ukraine if he hadn't been enabled by all the oil money paid to Russia by Europe and others. This worldwide practice of funneling money to despots just because they have oil needs to stop. We should not even be burning it anyway. There are alternatives. Why do we keep enabling these assholes?
- Show previous comments 4 more
-
@Wodahs I just know physics myself so I might be wrong as well but leaving things like politics aside and just going with the physics I think there’s already a very good economic case for things like big-rig diesel to switch to electricity, either directly on batteries or using ultra clean “synthetic” hydrocarbon fuel via fuel cell technology. To produce such fuel with nuclear power we could run the chemistry “backward” to make carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel from water and CO2 from the air. That way nobody needs to switch right away, yet we still take the geopolitical risk issue(s) off the table. (Though there would still be the distribution problem and point-of-use pollution issue putting pressure on the phase-out of internal combustion, especially within high-population areas.)
I'll point out that electrification of the delivery industry is already happening at the short-range end for delivery by entities like fedex or Amazon but give the battery technology a couple years and an infrastructure / environmental demand for it and I think we’ll be seeing even the long-haul stuff switch a lot sooner than most people think. This is where Tesla is going with their big-rig designs.
Of course vehicles the size of ships could use nuclear directly. There are designs for SMRs (small modular reactors) that could even be used without much in the way of training on the part of operators. They’re designed to be simple, passive heat sources that do their thing for 20 years then get swapped out for another unit.
Couple that / those to one of Stanford’s supercritical CO2 gas turbines and electric motors and you get a very simple, cheap design. Simpler even than current diesel/bunker fuel designs. Economically that’s a no-brainer for the merchant fleet.
We don’t need to be digging up “fossil” fuels.
(I do have concerns about nuclear waste because some of these designs are solid-fuel but if we also have larger molten-salt designs for grid power then the “waste” could be destroyed using them. We just need to be reasonably intelligent about the overall system design.)
As for the lithium supply issue, there are battery technologies out there that are even better than lithium. Tesla is already moving away from traditional lithium batteries even for EV applications. We're where we are now because the production was already there due to the consumer electronics industry. For instance, Toyota's first Prius models actually used batteries that were taken out of laptop battery assemblies and remanufactured into the automotive assemblies for use in the cars. Needless to say that was a highly uneconomic way to do it but even so it still made a profit for Toyota. It also showed Panasonic and others that the demand was there to build dedicated factories for the automotive applications, which of course lead more or less directly to full EVs and Tesla's Gigafactories.
Lithium will probably continue to be used in mobile applications because it makes for lightweight and energy-dense batteries. Obviously that has advantages for things like laptops, cellphones, cars, and planes but I think everywhere else will find other battery technologies that are more optimal for those other uses. For instance, I think that grid power storage and frequency control will probably switch to sodium-ion and/or iron-based batteries eventually simply for economic/profit reasons, especially if EVs become dominant and cheap electricity becomes common.
Also, even now lithium is not exactly in short supply. Worldwide there is plenty of the element. "Reserves" (discovered deposits) are limited because historically there has not been the demand to justify searching for more sources. Laptops and cellphones only require so much of it after all. Ultimately there will be more prospecting now because the demand is now higher, which will no doubt lead to more discovered sources, just as it has for oil.
We will never get into the same situation with lithium as oil in terms of geopolitics however. Or at least doing so should not be necessary if our "leaders" do their job right. There's a huge source of lithium readily available worldwide. With nuclear power we will have enough power to separate things like lithium and sodium from seawater. There's a lot of other stuff in seawater that we could also pull out at the same time that would help with the economics and make it happen sooner than later. This would include fresh water, which is also in short supply worldwide.
Already the Saudis, Israelis, and others are getting a significant amount of their fresh water from desalinization. I'm in California in the middle of a severe multi-decade drought that's threatening everything from farming and food supply to hydro power generation. Cheaper power would have an immediate economic benefit for us, and again help with the geopolitical risk issues. I mean, I've already got solar on the roof (no-brainer here in the southwest US with SoCalEdison's $0.42/kWh electricity) but distributed solar is really only useful for residential power and personal transport. It does not help much with water or industrial manufacturing/transport power needs.
-
i do agree with the there is alternatives that can take the function of oil
my post was more in the aspect of if ye hadnt given putin money for oil up untill now (as it was the point of how he got the capital for his war) we would have been giving it to Xi Jinping of china , who people would probably claim he would be using it for his expansion of territory's in the south china see and so on
we (companies in australia and one next door to my company) seem heavy in to producing hydrocarbon fuels for big equipment and have started exporting it (tho its still made by dirty methods) and have a couple of export ships running on gas for fuel which we also export , along with oil and coal and rear earth minerals including lithium (australia is as big as the us size wise we just dont have the population) we do seem to have a fair amount of resources here too most going to china or the asia pacific