We Might Not Have Enough Materials for All the Solar Panels and Wind Turbines We Need, an Analysis Finds (popularmechanics.com) 367
An anonymous reader writes: Plenty of high-tech electronic components, like solar panels, rechargeable batteries, and complex circuits require specific rare metals. These can include magnetic neodymium, electronic indium, and silver, along with lesser-known metals like praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. These metals are mined in large quantities in countries around the world, and they make their way into the supply chains of all sorts of electronics and renewables companies.
A group of researchers from the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure determined how many of these important metals will be required by 2050 in order to make enough solar panels and wind turbines to effectively combat climate change. With plenty of countries, states, cities, and companies pledging to go 100 percent renewable by 2050, the number of both solar panels and wind turbines is expected to skyrocket. According to the analysis, turbines and solar panels might be skyrocketing a bit too much. Demand for some metals like neodymium and indium could grow by more than a dozen times by 2050, and there simply might not be enough supply to power the green revolution.
A group of researchers from the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure determined how many of these important metals will be required by 2050 in order to make enough solar panels and wind turbines to effectively combat climate change. With plenty of countries, states, cities, and companies pledging to go 100 percent renewable by 2050, the number of both solar panels and wind turbines is expected to skyrocket. According to the analysis, turbines and solar panels might be skyrocketing a bit too much. Demand for some metals like neodymium and indium could grow by more than a dozen times by 2050, and there simply might not be enough supply to power the green revolution.
FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
Popular Mechanics? Idiots.
Solar panels don't use "rare earth" elements (and rare earth elements are not rare).
The dynamo in a wind turbine (Score:3, Informative)
Solar panels don't use "rare earth" elements
Not all renewable energy is photovoltaic. The dynamo in a wind turbine uses rare earth magnets.
Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine (Score:5, Informative)
There’s a persistent myth about wind turbines that just won’t seem to go away despite reality running to the contrary: they need rare earth materials to generate electricity.
For those not acquainted with rare earths like neodymium and dysprosium, they’re used in products from your iPhone and computer to flat screen TVs and certain types of batteries.
While they can be difficult to mine, rare is a misnomer: they exist in abundance throughout the earth’s crust.
Many people think rare earths are also a necessary component of wind turbines, but the facts find otherwise: only about two percent of the U.S. wind turbine fleet uses them, and that number shouldn’t change much in the years to come.
https://www.aweablog.org/rare-... [aweablog.org]
Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize this article is in fact an analysis of these materials and their accessible quantities and the determination that THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH OF THEM for the demand required through 2050. Rare is a subjective term this is quantative analysis of what is actually there not guesswork based on the word "rare" which you are battling. Abundant within the Earth's crust isn't particularly meaningful, we can't get to all the earths crust by a long shot and not all of what we can get to is easily accessible or cheaply accessible and even if we can get to it easily and cheaply we can still only pull it out so fast.
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Shaitan remonstrated:
You do realize this article is in fact an analysis of these materials and their accessible quantities and the determination that THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH OF THEM for the demand required through 2050. Abundant within the Earth's crust isn't particularly meaningful, we can't get to all the earths crust by a long shot and not all of what we can get to is easily accessible or cheaply accessible and even if we can get to it easily and cheaply we can still only pull it out so fast.
The major problems with the supply of rare earths are:
1. Their ores most commonly occur intermixed with uranite, so refining them entails the production of radioactive waste, and
2. They are not yet commonly recycled.
There's no real getting around the radioactive waste issue (although, if widespread support for licensing and constructing new nuclear power plants develops over the coming decades, I expect that REE separation and refining operations will become a routine feature of any n
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Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine (Score:4, Insightful)
California has some 'rare earth' deposits worth considering. Seeing how they are pushing alternative energy so hard, lets bring on the strip mining.
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They fail to recognize the fact that there are constantly new sources of these elements being discovered and there are good substitutions for all of them.
Oh goodness. I'm sure they didn't think of that at all.
Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine (Score:4, Interesting)
Probably didn't consider this:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/1... [cnbc.com]
Researchers have found hundreds of years' worth of rare-earth materials underneath Japanese waters — enough to supply to the world on a "semi-infinite basis," according to a study published in Nature Publishing Group's Scientific Reports.
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Tritium?
Not a rare earth; not a material for solar panels or wind turbines.
OTOH, the seabed is very easy to access all of these newly discovered rare earths.
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... but not so much about the rare earth elements market
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Yes, something that exists as 0.0033% of the crust isn't rare. We won't even get into the tiny fractions of a percent of that fraction of a percent that are actually in a position where mining is either economically or technologically possible. Or that governments wouldn't hold out and go to war over the resources when they even are able to be mined in an area.
"But, but, my non science based website says these elements aren't rare, even though the site owner probably cant spell Geologist or even mineral w
Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, something that exists as 0.0033% of the crust isn't rare. We won't even get into the tiny fractions of a percent of that fraction of a percent that are actually in a position where mining is either economically or technologically possible. Or that governments wouldn't hold out and go to war over the resources when they even are able to be mined in an area.
"But, but, my non science based website says these elements aren't rare, even though the site owner probably cant spell Geologist or even mineral without resorting to a dictionary!"
The surface area of the Earth is 5*10^8 km^2. The USGS says the thickness of the crust is 30 km, so the volume is 1.5*10^10 km^3. At your percentage, that would be 5*10^5 km^3 of whichever rare earth metal you're talking about. Let's take neodymium as an example, with a density of 7 g/cm^3, or 7*10^12 kg/km^3. That would be a total of 3.5*10^18 kg of neodymium in the Earth's crust. If only one millionth of that is accessible, that would still be enough for every person on Earth to have their own MW-scale wind turbine.
Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine (Score:5, Insightful)
The dynamo in a wind turbine currently uses rare earth magnets.
FTFY.
Neodymium magnets are used to make the generators smaller and a little more efficient. We already have other materials that will do the job, it will just be larger or a little less efficient. And if neodymium ends up being the bottleneck, well we'll get to figure out more about magnetism since we'll have a huge incentive for an alternative.
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Or we could just... build nuclear. Wind kills birds and disrupts air currents in the same manner that harvesting tidal energy or damming falls does. These technologies significant impact existing natural energy flows with consequences that in some cases we likely don't even know about yet. The same is probably true of suddenly sucking up all that light energy which should be reflecting around and warming things over a huge portion of the Earth's surface.
Nuclear on the other hand isn't harnessing and disrupt
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If we ever figure out fusion... then it'll be a no brainer.
Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine (Score:4, Insightful)
it seems like we'll never get to the next generation of reactors
Good.
Take a look at the history of the "next generation of reactors". They never quite live up to the hype. For example, pebble beds didn't turn out so good when they were actually built. And that pattern repeats itself over and over again.
Also, you're kinda glossing over the teeny-tiny problem of nuclear weapons proliferation if we're all supposed to start using breeder reactors.
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The same is probably true of suddenly sucking up all that light energy which should be reflecting around and warming things over a huge portion of the Earth's surface.
Considering that too much of that light energy being trapped and reflected around thanks to greenhouse gases is the problem causing climate change, absorbing more of it should only benefit us in combating the problem.
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Re: The dynamo in a wind turbine (Score:2)
You really don't know nuclear then.
Nuclear tends to warm the lakes it dumps into. yes it does through multiple heat exchangers. Check out how nuclear functions. Especially the cooling systems.
So nuclear is just as environmentally alternating as everything else.
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Compared to other environmental effects, waste heat is the least important of the impacts of any power source. It also has numerous industrial uses.
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Yes, turbines kill some birds, so do windows in buildings, which kill more and those same buildings disrupt the wind. Then there are cats, which kill many more birds, but at least don't disrupt the wind unless you plant trees for the cats to climb.
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Or we could just... build nuclear.
Which use generators to turn heat into electrical power... So are more efficient with neodymium.
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Please, don't call it a dynamo :) call it a generator - dynamo reminds me too much of a bicycle.
But you are "mostly" wrong on the rare earth magnets, some wind turbines use them in so called permanent excited generators, were the permanent excitation comes from rare earth magnets. Those generators are also synchronous generators, all their electrical power output needs to be channeled through a frequency converter to make it grid compatible.
Rare earth magnets have a very h
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Indeed:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/1... [cnbc.com]
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Re:FUD (Score:4, Insightful)
RTFA before trying to debunk it. The article and linked research explains what rare earth elements are, their respective rarities, which things use them, how much is used, and what they cost. Your comment adds nothing meaningful.
Re:FUD (Score:5, Insightful)
Indium is used in the transparent conductor Indium Tin Oxide. There are alternatives, such as Aluminium tin Oxide. Not as good, but it will be used if we are running out of Indium.
And others already wrote that Neodymium is not needed for wind turbines. It is just a generator in there, it can be built in many different ways.
Re: FUD (Score:2)
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And TFA is completely wrong.
Well that settles it (Score:4, Funny)
I guess we should just call off all the green initiative stuff (hippy liberal anyway) and fire up more coal plants.
Re:Well that settles it (Score:4, Funny)
I guess we should just call off all the green initiative stuff (hippy liberal anyway) and fire up more coal plants.
I'm buying all the beachfront property in Oregon for when it becomes the new tropical tourist hot-spot.
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Unfortunately, you beachfront property will be under water.
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At least fossil fuels and green tech have the same mantra now. Drill baby drill!
Finally some unity.
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THE SKY IS FALLING (Score:3)
Details on the Evening news.
Note, as time goes on, we find better ways to build this kind of stuff. By 2050, it's likely we'll have more efficient systems, and we'll find ways to build this stuff with less rare-earth materials.
Of course (Score:5, Funny)
They stopped teaching alchemy in schools ages ago, and now look where we are.
Have we run out of imagination as well? (Score:5, Insightful)
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but I'm having a hard time understanding why rare metal shortages would eliminate the possibility of making more wind turbines.
It isn't that that they can't be made; instead, it changes the cost-benefit equation. Let's say for example that element Imaginium improves the efficiency of generator windings by 50% and has the same mass as copper. A generator motor will then weigh substantially less than one using only copper. This then means that the tower to support the generator can be made with less material and the blades to turn it will have less stress. Removing the Imaginium then increases the cost and increases the lifetime main
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idiots spewing junk science (Score:2)
the crust of the earth is 20 miles thick.
the elements in use in fiber optics and magnets are not rare at all.
we've "barely scratched the surface"
there will be no shortages, it's impossible
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he crust of the earth is 20 miles thick.
I am not a geologist, but a rational person would also expect the heavier/denser stuff to settle closer to the bottom than to the top, over time...
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Drill baby drill.
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Rarity has nothing to do with it. The problem is the economic cost of mining them. People have commented that the ocean is full of Lithium so why worry about that. The reason people aren't extracting it is that it isn't economically feasible. The more costly it becomes to produce electricity, the more your utility rates will jump. The bigger the holes and the deeper the mines and the more associated waste and environmental destruction ensues from going after the rare earths, the more people will scream. The
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Oh, there will be shortages, you can be sure of that.
I'm quite sure there will be. I expect four or five in the intervening years, at least one of which will be artificially induced by Goldman Sachs for profit. The rest will be artificially induced by environmentalist lunatics protesting the opening of new mines.
And there's a solution for this (Score:5, Interesting)
And, who knows, we'll probably be prospecting asteroids by 2050. If the cost for certain materials on earth is high enough, there may be a business case for it. Indium costs about $5/gram presently, or $5M/tonne. If there's a resource crunch and the cost goes up, say, 5-fold, perhaps someone will have enough incentive to mine asteroid indium for $25M/tonne.
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Indium too expensive? .
Come on, if Indium is too expensive how come 90% of the H1Bs go to India? Wait... oops.
I'm not worried (Score:3)
Basic assumption. (Score:5, Insightful)
2. The known techniques and cost for extracting them today, will be the same till 2050
3. Similar study done in 1868 would have concluded there is not enough oil in Pottsville, PA to replace coal as a major source of fuel
4. Similar study done in 1750 would have concluded there is not enough coal to replace whale oil as a fuel for lighting
5. Similar study done in 1550 would have concluded the known reserves of whales and the cost of extracting oil from their blubber would be prohibitive and wax candles will be used forever for lighting.
Silicon Dioxide is everywhere (Score:2)
Silicon Dioxide is all over the place! Most abundant stuff on earth. We also have a lot of aluminum which is easy to recycle.
Lithium might be an issue for a while until we adapt... as we did in history. Recycling will eventually be the future. Rare magnets are NOT at all required for generators; or electric motors for that matter; it's not the end... maybe of cheap Chinese neodymium which might even be found as cheaply elsewhere.
Besides, all these matters are usually about CHEAP easy sources running out ta
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Lithium is fairly common. Look at all the elements less abundant than Lithium; many of them are cheap and plentiful:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Stop ignoring tidal and geothermal FTW (Score:3)
Nuclear, alternatives or space mining (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, human population is in decline where ever you find significant technical civilization. Assuming we don't regress (which, don't get me wrong, a not insignificant portion of humanity wants to) then it's a problem that will solve itself. People don't actually breed uncontrollably if they've got options. Japan, Singapore and now the US with their declining birthrates prove that.
Folks mostly have a ton of kids as a kind of makeshift retirement program and between automation and productivity increases we just aren't going to need the vast labor pool we used to. We are going to need a way to distribute the wealth from the bots an A.I.s. Either that or we're going have have a dystopia where the 1% have everything and the rest of the world looks like a mix of Ethiopia, Somalia and the worst years of the American Indian Reservations.
Remember the Lithium Shortage? (Score:2)
I remember when they were predicting lithium shortages for EVs. Didn't happen. It may be that environmentalists have to decide which of their loathed pollutions to live with: byproduct of magnet materials or carbon, but the materials can be obtained if not outlawed.
No problem (Score:2)
There countries actually working on the problem.
https://spaceresources.public.... [public.lu]
Solar Molten Salt FTW (Score:2)
If we can make mirrors we can make solar plants that use molten salt (which can work for baseline as it continues to produce energy after the sun sets).
And they look awesome!
https://gbtimes.com/asias-firs... [gbtimes.com]
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Here's the Crescent Dunes installation in Nevada.
https://www.solarreserve.com/e... [solarreserve.com]
Google Map link:
https://www.google.com/maps/pl... [google.com]
Where there is high demand (Score:2)
There will be high levels of innovation to drive down cost/find more efficient ways to design said solar panels and wind turbines.
2050 is in 32 years. Enough said.
See? Donuts Trump (Score:2)
Alternatives (Score:2)
Sand, Electricity (Score:2)
Check.
Stop worrying.
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We were supposed to reach that 25 years ago or so. So I'm not holding my breath. Besides: what about recycling? Do that correctly, including taxes for electronics that go faulty too fast and you've fixed some of the problems with resources.
We did hit a "peak oil" in that it became increasingly more expensive to extract oil- but then new technologies pushed the slide back a little. We will probably see several mini-peaks where what's available becomes harder to extract and more expensive, and then new technology comes along that will make it cheaper again.
Re:You mean like peak oil? (Score:5, Insightful)
The stone age didn't end because they ran out of stones.
The oil age will not end because we run out of oil.
The oil age will end because we have better, cheaper sources of energy and we need to stop burning fossil fuels.
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Solar -> electricity + co2 + h2o -> metane or Biomass -> biodiesel are good methods of putting reducing the CO2 load on the atmosphere by closing the cycle.
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The oil age will end because we have better, cheaper sources of energy and we need to stop burning fossil fuels.
Ideally, yes. Running out of oil is not an impossibility in the end.
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The stone age didn't end because they ran out of stones.
The oil age will not end because we run out of oil.
The oil age will end because we have better, cheaper sources of energy and we need to stop burning fossil fuels.
Peak Oil wasn't about running out of oil though- the theory said we would hit a point where we could no longer get oil cheaply and it would become increasingly expensive.
We stopped using whale blubber for lighting our lamps long before we ran out of whales. If we do indeed hit a point where oil starts becoming more expensive for a long period of time- that would make alternatives that are too expensive now, suddenly look cheaper by comparison.
We're probably at least a couple of decades away from oil no lon
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We were supposed to reach that 25 years ago or so. So I'm not holding my breath. Besides: what about recycling? Do that correctly, including taxes for electronics that go faulty too fast and you've fixed some of the problems with resources.
We did hit a "peak oil" in that it became increasingly more expensive to extract oil- but then new technologies pushed the slide back a little. We will probably see several mini-peaks where what's available becomes harder to extract and more expensive, and then new technology comes along that will make it cheaper again.
So, in other words, we didn't hit peak.
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And that's the problem with all of these "the sky is falling and there's not enough" studies - they assume that status quo technologies and manufacturing will continue even as the economic realities around them change. Few of these materials are the *only* way to build PV or wind generators. They're just the best balance at the moment given prices and engineering goals. If you move the prices around (higher), the engineers may move on to a different way of doing things, or more mining capacity may be dev
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I've been saying this for a decade. The conclusion didn't require a team of overpaid researchers to deduce.
And you can keep saying it for another decade and still be wrong. Up until recently there was no incentive to open up more rare earth mines because the Chinese were supplying everyone cheaply. But then they stopped and now rare earth mines are opening up [theverge.com], thus solving the supply issue. Amazing, eh?
Re:100% (Score:4, Informative)
Multiple studies have shown that 100% of energy needs can be met by renewables. We don't need fossil fuels.
Here's a few... try Google for more...
https://interestingengineering... [interestin...eering.com]
https://physicsworld.com/a/100... [physicsworld.com]
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
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Multiple studies have shown that 100% of energy needs can be met by renewables. We don't need fossil fuels. Here's a few... try Google for more... https://interestingengineering... [interestin...eering.com] https://physicsworld.com/a/100... [physicsworld.com] https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
Then how come we aren't?
Because of rich guys in top hats smoking cigars, cackling with glee as the planet burns?
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Yes.
A few rich people making lots of money from fossil fuels have screwed the rest of us... and will continue until we come up with the French solution.
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Case 1 PG&L has decided to retire three gas fired peak power plants and replace them with batteries. Contract already awarded. It calls for one 1.2 GWh battery system, and a 700 MWh battery system. It is cheaper to store this much electricity to meet the peak demand of CA summer afternoon-evenings than to run gas powered plants. This 1.9 GWh of batteries represent 4.75% of the total battery making capacity of the world
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Multiple studies have shown that 100% of energy needs can be met by renewables.
Then how come we aren't?
Because of rich guys in top hats smoking cigars, cackling with glee as the planet burns?
Inertia. The aforementioned rich guys in top hats, wearing monocles and smoking cigars, spent a ton of capital on coal plants. They want a return on their investment, and they're in a position to see to it that they get one.
You can expect 30 to 40 years of heavy resistance while they do everything in their considerable power to protect their investments. As the existing fleet of coal plants rust out and fail, resistance will decline. Also a good many of those rich guys are old. Resistance will decline
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So we're already at the global peak of non fossil fuels?
https://data.worldbank.org/ind... [worldbank.org]
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Umm, don't count on it. Businesses making those kinds of bets get their management fired or they die. Maybe market forces will produce a substitute, but it will, at least at first, cost a lot more, and possibly perform not as well.
Market forces might just as easily push your wind turbines out and substitute something else more economical (which may or may not be as nice by some other metric), if materials science and availability of the resources don't cooperate!
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Because there will definitely be no breakthroughs in materials science or anything like that in the next 30 years and we're definitely going to be making bearings and motors and magnets and coils using the same stuff as today for sure./
None are even needed. Solar thermal is very low tech, and while it's a bit more expensive than modern PV panels, it's not a big difference in the scheme of things.
Heck, looking farther forward, the plans I've see for orbital solar are solar thermal, because large mirrors can be made much lighter than large PV panels (and are easier to service as a result). Fun fact: orbital solar would actually be the cheapest sustainable power source, it's only the huge initial capital cost that makes it unappealing (tho
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Re:Wow yes (Score:5, Informative)
It wasn't new and shiny. It was cheap.
It was known to be inferior, but thought to be good enough (it wasn't).
Re:Wow yes (Score:5, Informative)
aluminum - didn't work out too well.
It works just fine. Look up some time. All that stuff strung between the poles and transmission towers ... aluminum. So is the stuff underground. Even the larger service lines into your house are made of aluminum. Pretty much the only copper left is small wire (branch circuits from your panel) due to the higher cost of terminating aluminum properly.
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When I was a kid, my Dad installed some aluminium wiring in the house. After a couple of sockets started smoking, he ripped it all out and replaced it with copper.
Aluminium has its place in wiring, but so does copper.
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When I was a kid, my Dad installed some aluminium wiring in the house. After a couple of sockets started smoking, he ripped it all out and replaced it with copper.
American mobile homes of the 1960s and 1970s were also made with it, because it was both cheaper and lighter than copper. But yes, galvanic corrosion would cause problems like that eventually. The simpler fix, which works okay, is to install pigtails on the ends of the wires designed to solve this problem. I'm not sure exactly what's in them, but there are various ways to handle it.
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Galvanic corrosion is a problem, but the more basic problem is that aluminum aggressively forms an insulating surface oxide. Any good hardware store sells stuff that can be slathered onto a fresh, clean aluminum surface before it's screwed or crimped to copper. Just to be sure, add some more when you're done.
Electrical wire aluminum might also have some problem with creeping under pressure; I don't know.
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IIRC, the problem happened where the wire was under the screw on the socket and thought it was from oxidization. If there was stuff to stop the oxidization, it wasn't well advertised back then.
Re:Wow yes (Score:5, Insightful)
LOL. Uh, no. You'll have to provide some pretty hefty citations and facts to back up that ludicrous bunch of baloney.
Really? You're that lazy? And also ignorant? So... you're stupid. From fucking Wikipedia:
The bare wire conductors on the line are generally made of aluminum (either plain or reinforced with steel, or composite materials such as carbon and glass fiber)..
Or you could just look at the fucking pictures, since you're too stupid to read:Sample cross section [wikimedia.org] Carbon Core [wikimedia.org].
Idiot.
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He already did, go out and look up your citation is there.
Aluminium wire has to be 1.5x the cross section of copper to carry the same current. At that size it is less than half the weight and it is why this metal is commonly used in power transmission and is exclusively used in high voltage overhead transmission.
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Modern, safer reactor designs are absolutely an integral part of combating climate change and divesting ourselves of fossil fuels.
I don't think design is the problem so much as regulatory and public resistance. The US navy uses two reactors rated at ~500MW on each Nimitz class carrier. Setting one of these up near a large body of water for cooling would be a trivial matter; these are already mounted in a ship. The Navy has plenty of retired personnel quite knowledgeable in the operation and maintenance of these and thus far their operational history is without incident. I don't think widespread nuclear adoption is a difficult task fro
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Yeah, it would be terrifying to have a Chernobyl happening every day, wouldn't it? I mean, that would mean that nuclear power would produce almost as many fatalities as New York City traffic does....
Assuming a Chernobyl every day, of course. If we had TWO Chernobyls daily, we'd have almost as many nuclear-related fatalities as New York City AND Los Angeles traffic deaths produce.
Note, by the by, that the New Yo
Re:But this is impossible! (Score:4, Interesting)
Can't we send a 3D printer to the Asteroid Belt or the center of the Earth to make solar panels and send them to us?
Can't we just make solar panels out of coal . . . ?
We seem to have enough of that now, that nobody wants.
And think of the brilliant irony, of former coal miners now producing solar panels.
We CAN do it. (Score:3)
Can't we just make solar panels out of coal . . .
Out of carbon? Yes we can. A company has, for several years, been making them of carbon nanotubes and non-rare, not-particularly-toxic, not-silicon, nanodiode arrays.
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