The big problem is the mining and toxic pollution problems from new tech stuff

China produces 95% of those rare earth products because no-one else wants the incredible toxic mess it generates to create a final useable product

So when the entire world goes battery mad, just like when the entire world went fossil fuel mad….

we're going to create ANOTHER huge global mess…. just like we did the last time

There is talk of mining Lithium In Cornwall it will be interesting to see how the waste and by products of production are to be dealt with.

Edited By V8Eng on 13/01/2023 15:08:37

Edited By V8Eng on 13/01/2023 15:18:01

Look for a Hannah Fry documentary in iPlayer:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001f7y1/the-secret-genius-of-modern-life-series-1-4-electric-car

**LINK**

Apparently lithium batteries were developed for early camcorders. A small California startup realised that they enabled high performance electric cars and built a roadster using 100s of them. It cost a bomb and they never managed to get funding to take it beyond a prototype though the car they built had stunning performance. A certain Elon Musk came along and bought the technology and the rest as they is history.

I believe that Tesla are almost unique in EVs in that they use induction motors (hence presumably the name).

Early mobile phones used NiCAD then NiMH batteries.

A certain Elon Musk came along and bought the technology and the rest as they is history.

Sounds like Mushet

He made the first decent steel railway rails

Everyone has heard of Bessemer, Carnegie etc, but not Mushet

Loads of lithium in Cornwall according to the interweb. Rare earth minerals are misnamed, they aren't all that rare at all, they just thought they were when they were first discovered. They are developing sodium batteries now and that isn't rare at all, millions of tons of it under Cheshire.

Reported a few days back, Sweden has discovered a goldmine of rare earth deposits. Enough to cut China out of the European requirements.

The statistic is untrustworthy because it's in bonkers units:

• 'monster massive bits of mobile mining equipment' is meaningless compared with kilograms
• '300,000 miles at 40 mpg' is daft compared with litres!

However, fairly easy to estimate the real cost in real numbers:

• A Tesla battery contains about 8kg of Lithium
• A metric ton of Lithium metal today costs about $435,000
• A litre of UK Diesel today costs £1.19 wholesale, about $1.45

So a Tesla battery contains $3626 worth of Lithium, which costs the same as 2500 litres of diesel.

The average build cost of an ordinary car is about 42MJ per kilogram. So, a car weighing 3000kg will cost about 57MJ, about 1800 litres of diesel.

Thus an EV costs more to build than an equivalent IC car, shock horror! But the EV has important advantages:

• Lithium isn't destroyed by using the battery: the metal is almost 100% recoverable, and can be recycled almost permanently
• The electricity used to charge the battery can come from renewable sources, unlike irreplaceable oil which is destroyed by burning
• Renewable energy will be much cheaper in future, whilst the cost of oil will skyrocket over the next 30 years, rendering the IC car I drive today unaffordium. (Not believing this won't stop it happening! )
• EVs emit no pollution in crowded towns and cities, and there is plenty of scope for using renewable energy during production, also reducing harmful CO2 in the atmosphere

Dave

Edited By SillyOldDuffer on 14/01/2023 10:24:26

Sodium batteries are not new. I rode in a bus powered by a Sodium-Sulphur battery in 1979. And it was British.
A primary source of a Sodium chemical is seawater.

On Lithium cell recycling, this has some way to go. Due to the construction of the cells there is a lot of work to extract the Li in a usable form. I know one supplier of Lithium primary cells (which have even more metallic Li in them) who sold off unused cells near the end of their shelf life as surplus for pennies because it cost more to get the Li extracted than it was worth. Otherwise they had to pay for disposal of the "expired" cells as hazardous waste.

Robert G8RPI.