Toyota Plans $1.29 Billion Electric Vehicle Battery Factory In North Carolina (newsobserver.com) 77
Toyota will open a multi-billion dollar battery plant with at least 1,750 employees about an hour's drive outside the Triangle, after North Carolina approved an incentive package Monday worth $438.7 million for the company -- one of the largest manufacturing investments in the state's history. From the News & Observer: The Japanese auto maker announced in October it would build a $1.29 billion facility in the United States to manufacture hybrid and electric vehicle batteries -- a key component of the company's plans to make 70% of its cars electric by the end of the decade. The plant known as Toyota Battery Manufacturing, North Carolina will be built in Liberty, a small town in Randolph County that is home to the Greensboro-Randolph Megasite, one of the designated areas in North Carolina the state markets to potential large manufacturers.
Toyota will launch production in 2025 and expand operations by 2031. The site will produce 1.2 million battery packs per year, said Chris Reynolds, chief administrative officer of corporate resources for Toyota North America. The state's Economic Investment Committee approved the state's incentive for Toyota -- referred to internally as Project Darwin -- at a special meeting in Raleigh on Monday. The state's contribution is just one part of an incentive package from numerous entities that could reach $271.4 million. Reynolds did not have a timeline for when construction of the plant would begin but that it would be operational in 2025. Toyota eventually will create 1,750 jobs into 2029, with the jobs paying a minimum average wage of $62,234, according to the state's Commerce Department.
Toyota will launch production in 2025 and expand operations by 2031. The site will produce 1.2 million battery packs per year, said Chris Reynolds, chief administrative officer of corporate resources for Toyota North America. The state's Economic Investment Committee approved the state's incentive for Toyota -- referred to internally as Project Darwin -- at a special meeting in Raleigh on Monday. The state's contribution is just one part of an incentive package from numerous entities that could reach $271.4 million. Reynolds did not have a timeline for when construction of the plant would begin but that it would be operational in 2025. Toyota eventually will create 1,750 jobs into 2029, with the jobs paying a minimum average wage of $62,234, according to the state's Commerce Department.
Smart move (Score:5, Funny)
Move all the handling of toxic heavy metals offshore to somewhere with lax worker safety laws, and lax environmental controls.... smart.
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Move all the handling of toxic heavy metals offshore to somewhere with lax worker safety laws, and lax environmental controls.... smart.
Just following the lead of Alabama [cnn.com]. Then again, it's not like North Carolina hasn't had issues before [cbsnews.com].
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Toyota isn't making the batteries.
Besides the metals used in EV Batteries are not as bad the constant pumping of oil which we are happy to do on our own farmlands.
Better is not perfect. EV Cars are Better for the environment over ICE cars especially over the lifetime of the car, many of the environmental downsides of the EV, have remediation methodologies that actually reduce its levels even more (Battery Recycling, Home Solar to help reduce demand on the grid...) But still it isn't 0 impact on the envrionm
Where's the recycling operation? (Score:2)
Lithium battery recycling isn't a thing in the US and it desperately needs to be. Oh, sure, places like Batteries+ will take them but you have to pay them for the privilege.
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So people will certainly continue to keep that stuff in their drawers, until the day when that "precious material" actually has a positive price tag on it.
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I have a big box of dead Lipo batteries waiting until their are worth something. Ironically, I can get decent money for dead lead-acid batteries.
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Re:Where's the recycling operation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lithium battery recycling isn't a thing in the US and it desperately needs to be.
I'm not sure what you're on about but EVs have their batteries repurposed for use in grid-scale batteries. "Bad" lithium-ion batteries are just one's with reduced capacity which is only a problem if you volume and weight a in issue.
Lithium-ion batteries will be recycled as there are people working the problem currently to make it as efficient as possible. The real problem we face is e-waste because idiots keep buying new electronics annually.
If you want to solve both problem then you would simply add a recycling tax to everything based on how difficult it is to recycle.
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the idea of a grid-scale battery system using used car batteries seems unbelievably impractical.
Why would it be impractical? Old EV batteries usually have 80% of their original capacity which is just fine when volume and weight aren't an issue. [canarymedia.com]
There is a lot of investment in this area [canarymedia.com] because a large wave of EV batteries are going to be retired in the next decade [dwcdn.net] to make cheap grid-scale batteries.
Energy storage is the hottest growth sector of the U.S. power industry, expanding faster than solar, wind or any of the older types of power plants. Expansion in battery manufacturing capacity pushes prices down, making the technology more cost-competitive over time.
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Why would it be impractical?
Because you have batteries of with unknown properties, packed tightly into the frame of a car, which is going to bring with it costs in labor to work out. Maybe some car maker, or someone else that has already developed intimate knowledge of the car, could buy up old BEVs for resale as grid scale storage. This would likely involve engineering in this process from the start, before the car gets to mass production, to make it practical.
It used to be that BEVs had the batteries bolted on a frame like the eng
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Name a single EV -- just one -- that today uses batteries as part of the load-bearing structure. This problem exists in your head only.
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https://electrek.co/2021/01/19... [electrek.co]
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That hasn't happened yet. And on top of that, as is pretty obvious from the picture, the batteries can be removed from the pack.
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Name a single EV -- just one -- that today uses batteries as part of the load-bearing structure.
Tesla Model S and 3 at minimum ALREADY use the battery as a stiffening member, and Tesla is about to double down on this and make it even more relevant to chassis stiffness in models S and Y.
https://www.latimes.com/busine... [latimes.com]
https://electrek.co/2021/01/19... [electrek.co]
By all means, roast that sucker when he's wrong, but you are way off base here.
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No, I'm not. It's the pack and not the batteries within the pack, that is used for stiffening in Teslas. (All the) individual batteries can still be removed without the car collapsing in on itself, which is what MacMann was suggesting. Go see the picture of the honeycomb structure in the link he posted if you don't believe me.
Re: Where's the recycling operation? (Score:2)
It would help if you knew what these words meant. You are confusing cells and batteries.
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FFS stop being pedantic when it makes you miss the wood for the trees. MacMann was suggesting that cathode and anode materials would be difficult to recycle because the battery is structural. This is not the case because the cells, in which the cathode and anode materials are located, can be individually removed in the only structural design that is close to being used, the honeycomb design in upcoming revisions to the M3 and MY. Are you suggesting that the cathode and anode materials are in some way diffic
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What I'm saying is that his argument is bullshit because battery packs are already structural and it's already not a problem. Even though the Tesla model S battery pack case is a structural member, it contains sub-modules which people are successfully using for energy storage, or even building their own EV conversions.
A number of purpose-built EVs, perhaps even a majority, are already using structural batteries, and yet their batteries are getting reused for other purposes, so the whole notion that structur
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Then we're both saying more or less the same thing.
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Automotive batteries are hardly of "unknown properties". Just ask the manufacturer what is in there, and ask the BMS what state they are in. Pass a law mandating that the data is made available if you have to.
Automotive battery packs are some of the most well documented, understood and characterized batteries in the world. Manufacturers spend huge amounts of time and money understanding them, particularly how they age and how to measure the remaining energy storage capacity.
Most automotive batteries outlive
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Automotive batteries are hardly of "unknown properties".
I was referring to the electrical properties, which in a battery will change over time.
To learn these properties would involve putting the battery under a load, or a charge/discharge cycle, or other similar testing. This is about like what an automotive shop will do to test a common lead-acid car battery. The kind of tests they run are quite simple since this is a matter of pass/fail for a battery that costs about $100 to replace. For a much larger battery from an EV intended for use in grid storage they
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The testing needs to be cheap and fast enough, with enough batteries passing the testing, to be worth trying.
Most EV packs are that good after use, and some are broken up into smaller parts already and are easier to handle than the monolithic packs used in other vehicles. Most of the big packs break down pretty easily into smaller modules (Tesla packs notably fall into this category, even though they are made of many small cells, they are also made of sub-modules) and so can cost-effectively be reused.
For a much larger battery from an EV intended for use in grid storage they'd need to have more data, which will take more time, more power, and therefore more money.
Time isn't necessarily money when it's automated testing. And while testing more packs does require more power, it
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Scientist or Engineer: Explains the issue in great detail.
Average Joe: This is over my head, you should explain it so I can under stand it.
Scientist or Engineer: Simplifies the statement, trying to cut out the Math and the advanced Probably results.
Average Joe: This is still too much, stop talking down to me with your fancy words,
Scientist or Engineer: Oversimplifies the statement, to its most basic idea and concepts.
Average Joe: You guys are a scam, What about this and that factor. I am much smarter than
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If you want to solve both problem then you would simply add a recycling tax to everything based on how difficult it is to recycle.
There is no such thing as "simply" adding a tax. Getting any tax in place takes a lot of work, and keeping it there will be difficult if people don't want it.
When it comes to a recycling tax based on something as complex as the cost of recycling there will be endless debate on the tax rate. Just getting an import tax on dolls went to courts to debate on if a given item was to be taxed as a "doll" or a "toy", because for some reason "toys" are taxed differently than "dolls".
If your solution to a problem is
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Develop a battery recycling process that is so simple and low cost that the people recycling the batteries can pay people to recycle the batteries
The batteries that are for some reason being discussed are home electronics LiPo and aint worth shit in recycled materials and never will be. They are too small, the cells too fragile, and even getting access to the the cell pack inside requires non-trivial disassembly of the electronic device, so there is no refurbishing opportunity either.
The proposed factory will be making good-sized LiFePo4 cells. These cells are already being recycled to some degree, and because the cells are of meaningful size, eve
We solved it (Re:Where's the recycling operation?) (Score:2)
It sounds like we solved the problem then.
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"Bad" lithium-ion batteries are just one's with reduced capacity which is only a problem if you volume and weight a in issue.
That's not true at all. "Bad" lithium ion batteries are ones which have swelled up, and you can't use them any more for fear that they will turn into fire. I have a number of these from my RC cars and drones, and no good place to recycle them. The same thing will happen to some percentage of EV batteries, except not in 1:10 scale.
MOST EV batteries are still useful after their primary purpose, but not all of them, and we still have to deal with the remainder... plus all the lithium batteries from consumer el
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"Bad" lithium ion batteries are ones which have swelled up,
Those are damaged cells. Their only use is as components to be reused after deconstruction. There are multiple safeguards in place to ensure you don't overcharge battery cells like you did to your lithium-ion battery packs.
MOST EV batteries are still useful after their primary purpose, but not all of them, and we still have to deal with the remainder
Damaged cells (like the ones you describe) can only caught if they are known to be damaged. Since you can't actually view them in EVs without significant effort, if it's not a manufacturer recall then you won't know until the car is on fire, thereby destroying every battery cell in the
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Damaged cells (like the ones you describe) can only caught if they are known to be damaged. Since you can't actually view them in EVs without significant effort
You don't have to view damaged cells to detect them. If you have per-cell BMS, as all lithium batteries should*, then you can detect them because you are constantly having to balance around them.
* Assuming they have internal BMS, that is. Some BMS is handled by a charger. Some chargers can identify batteries and therefore keep track of their cell health. This is done in high end RC car chargers, it's literally hobby technology. In EVs the BMS is either inside the pack or between the charger and the battery
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Sensors can only detect damaged cells after they release a gas, at which point a fire is imminent because the pathway the gas take doubles as a way for air to get in and the electrolyte combusts when exposed to air. It's a good safety feature to have but it won't prevent the battery cell from combusting and taking the rest of the battery pack with it.
I'm quite aware of the functionality of a proper BMS as I've personally designed 24 cell BMS and charger to replace an inferior set that were designed to comp
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Sensors can only detect damaged cells after they release a gas
I'm not talking about sensors that detect ruptured cells, I'm talking about keeping track of which cells are failing based on their charge and discharge characteristics. This is most practical with the least cells, but really ought to be considered minimum equipment for a high-dollar battery.
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Erm... you started off with"Bad" lithium ion batteries are ones which have swelled up, and you can't use them any more for fear that they will turn into fire.
I'm talking about keeping track of which cells are failing based on their charge and discharge characteristics.
Well
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ARG! No edit functionality!
If you are talking about "cell balancing" then that's only a problem with cheaply made charging packs.
If you are talking about decreased capacity due to dendrite growth then EV BMS' have wear balancing much like solid state memory.
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you started off with"Bad" lithium ion batteries are ones which have swelled up
Yeah, it is difficult but possible to detect internall battery faults from the BMS, I haven't read all of this but... https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4893... [mdpi.com]
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Alas, even detecting a faulty cell in an EV battery doesn't result in the stockpiling of faulty cells because EV batteries are not deconstructed until they have completely lost the ability to hold any charge. The faulty cell is simply no longer used and lies dormant.
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However, this conversation was not all for naught as I learned something and will be updating my own BMS.
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plus all the lithium batteries from consumer electronics.
Relatively speaking, that's a small amount of material BUT it should be recycled which is why I suggest a recycling tax because e-waste is a real issue.
Rochester NY, recycling plant (Score:4, Informative)
FWIW: virtual tour [waste360.com]
Re:Where's the recycling operation? (Score:4, Funny)
What's next?! Having to pay to have your rubbish disposed of?
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Well, you'd pay one way or another for battery recycling. For the record I think it *should* be compulsory, but compulsory or voluntary it's not going to be free as long as it is cheaper to make batteries with virgin materials.
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It's being worked on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redwood_Materials,_Inc. [wikipedia.org]
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Lithium battery recycling isn't a thing in the US
Whaaat? I'm in the US and I can put them in the blue curbside recycling bucket. This is mostly used for glass, but you can also recycle all types of batteries except lead acid. (those you can recycle and get paid, though)
You can also drop them off free at Rite-Aid, Walgreens, Fred Meyer (Kroger), Ace Hardware, or most county waste transfer sites.
Re: Where's the recycling operation? (Score:2)
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Its about time companies that rely on lithium batteries like phone makers, laptop makers, any rechargeable gadget makers were forced to contribute funds to creating more recycling facilities (or cleanup operations) seeing they started the problem
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Good for them to realize batteries are the ... (Score:2)
Unluckily, many other reputable car manufacturers still think they will survive by buying batteries or complete power trains as a commodity, only putting some icing on the cake by adding some fancy entertainment system and a brand name.
Such might sustain some tiny niche luxury brands, but Joe Average will rather buy from those that can offer good value per co
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If you think Toyota will build this factory and then hoard the batteries for themselves then you think Toyota is going to be stupid about their battery supply, while calling them smart.
Selling cars is selling batteries, and Toyota can and will easily determine not only the cost of the production of batteries but also the value added by wrapping cars around them. Those that seem to think that they wont sell to others for
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If Toyota's batteries are better than other manufacturers can come up with then it gives them a competitive advantage. So maybe they will just have some batteries no better than anyone else's and then you'd be right, there would be no reason not to sell them to everyone else. But if their batteries are better somehow, then it behooves them to keep them all internal until the others catch up so that people are motivated to buy Toyotas. Remember, their core business (and competency) is selling cars, not batte
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If Toyota's batteries are better than other manufacturers can come up with then it gives them a competitive advantage.
Thats true when its Toyota as well as when its BatteryCompany.
But if their batteries are better somehow, then it behooves them to keep them all internal until the others catch up
You are saying it would behoove them to make a large financial mistake. You understand that, right? You dont, because you dont understand economics. If Toyota does that, SELL ANY STOCK YOU HAVE of theirs IMMEDIATELY
More needed. (Score:2)
This is a good start but we need a lot more battery factories. The total battery capacity needed to help replace fossil fuel systems with battery backed solar/wind is staggering. To get these batteries cheaply into grid-scale batteries, we need a LOT more EVs on the road.
Staggering (Re:More needed.) (Score:2)
The total battery capacity needed to help replace fossil fuel systems with battery backed solar/wind is staggering.
Yes, it is staggering. Anyone have any idea how staggering? Well, some people did the math.
Big-ass batteries
In July of 2017, Elon Musk promised to build a 100-MW lithium-ion battery in 100 days, to store the excess production of a South Australian wind farm.1
If he makes his self-imposed 100-day deadline, the price is $50 Million. If he misses the deadline, itâ(TM)s free. (No worries â" he can afford it.)
Existing Li-ion battery technology enables a storage capacity of one kWhr with about 77 grams of lithium metal.2 So Muskâ(TM)s battery will contain about 10 tons of lithium.3
That is one big-ass battery. But itâ(TM)s still not big enough â" like everything else in the field of renewables, itâ(TM)s a nice idea that doesnâ(TM)t scale.
One hour of energy storage for the Roadmapâ(TM)s 1,591-GW grid would require over 122,000 tonnes of lithium (77 tonnes per GW-hr Ã-- 1,591.)
Thatâ(TM)s more than 3 times the total global production of lithium in 2016, which was 36,000 tonnes.4 Flip the numbers around:
All the lithium mined on planet Earth in 2016 would provide a whopping 18 minutes of all-grid storage for the 2050 Roadmap (36,000 tonnes à 122,000 tonnes = 0.3. And 0.3 hrs = 18 minutes.)
From: https://www.roadmaptonowhere.c... [roadmaptonowhere.com]
It's not likely to see grid scale storage to catch on. There's other means to store energy on the grid. We could use pumped hydro, thermal energy storage, synthesized fuels (hydrogen, ammonia, etc.), perhaps others.
Lithium production is increasing, an estimated 82,000 metric tons of lithium were produced in 2020.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
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Yes, it is staggering. Anyone have any idea how staggering? Well, some people did the math.
It was already explained they would need 200 Gigafactories to produce the number of batteries required just for EVs to replace ICEVs. This is not an unknown problem.
It's not likely to see grid scale storage to catch on.
The global plan is to replace ICEVs with EVs which means scaling up lithium extraction, refinement, and battery production. It's not like nobody has considered the hurdles involved. I would also point out that cell capacity is increasing which means more storage per gram of lithium, so your numbers are off.
There's other means to store energy on the grid. We could use pumped hydro, thermal energy storage, synthesized fuels (hydrogen, ammonia, etc.), perhaps others.
I'm not against any of these things
We solved the zero carbon problem, now celebrate! (Score:3, Informative)
To build these batteries and meet their goal of lower CO2 emissions we need to use energy that is low in CO2 to make these batteries, and charge them up. While we might get some reductions by burning fossil fuels to make the batteries and charge the cars these batteries go into that's far from zero carbon. Nothing is truly zero carbon but we have technologies that we call "zero carbon" because they are so close to zero that we stop counting. If solar power is "zero carbon" then anything producing less carbon is also "zero carbon".
What's produces less carbon than solar power? Nuclear fission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
A source with a helpful chart: https://ourworldindata.org/saf... [ourworldindata.org]
That last source shows safety of the various energy sources, where nuclear power does well by comparison but newer analysis shows it is the safest source we have.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/... [nextbigfuture.com]
This source not only shows nuclear power safety, and low CO2 emissions, but also low raw material demands.
https://cmo-ripu.blogspot.com/... [blogspot.com]
How much does nuclear fission power cost? Turns out it is quite low in cost by many studies. New nuclear power on existing nuclear power plant sites is the lowest cost of all. If building new nuclear on a new site then only utility scale solar and onshore wind are lower in cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
If onshore wind and utility scale solar solar are lower in cost then why bother with nuclear fission? Because it produces less CO2, causes fewer human deaths, takes less raw materials, but also takes less land area. This is demonstrated by a chart created by Dr. David MacKay: http://www.inference.org.uk/su... [inference.org.uk]
What is not on that chart is that nuclear power is capable of producing 1000 W/m^2, orders of magnitude less land use than any renewable energy source. That chart is from Dr. MacKay's online book which covers this problem and more in considerable detail: http://www.withouthotair.com/ [withouthotair.com]
There's also the problem of wind and solar power being intermittent. We will need some energy sources that are reliable, not dependent on the weather, or time of day, for power to the grid. For that we need nuclear fission with some thermal energy storage. Hydro is another reliable and low CO2 energy source but this costs more than nuclear fission, and while quite tolerant to weather changes it is not immune to droughts. Pumped hydro is another storage method that is quite simple like thermal energy storage but that requires favorable climate and geography to be viable. We can put air cooled molten salt nuclear power and thermal energy storage anywhere there is air, and we can use tried and true water cooled nuclear power on any seashore, river, or in a desert if we plan things out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Water cooled nuclear works very well today, air cooled nuclear will be coming soon enough.
We will be building more nuclear power plants in the USA and around the world. Once we do that I expect other technologies to come along to compete with battery powered cars for the "zero carbon" prize. A big one being synthesized hydrocarbon fuels.
Anyone want to tell me I'm wrong? That batteries and solar will make nuclear fission obsolete? Okay, fine, that just means we solved our global warming problems a bit earlier
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All of these have life cycle CO2 less than nuclear, some only one third of nuclear:
Solar PV – rooftop 26 41 60
Geothermal 6.0 38 79
Concentrated solar power 8.8 27 63
Wind Offshore 8.0 12 35
Wind Onshore 7.0 11 56
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they all have a life cycle hundreds of times less than nuclear, though these are only the half-life cycles:
Pu-239 24000
Sr-90 28
etc.
Although some locales have better technology for dealing with the waste than others:
Fukushima
Hanford
Casalesi
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Although some locales have better technology for dealing with the waste than others:
Fukushima
That's a one in a million accident, hardly representative of the industry. The deaths from Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Three Mile Island was included in the safety calculations. Bringing this up is meaningless since that was already taken into account.
Hanford
That's a weapon production facility, it has nothing to do with nuclear power. Should we include every sunburn as an injury from solar power?
Casalesi
I don't know what that is. How about a link? Something more descriptive so I know WTF you are concerned about? My gu
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That's a one in a million accident
That's not true. 1.5% of all commercial power producing nuclear reactors ever built have melted down.
https://www3.nd.edu/~kshrader/... [nd.edu]
So far from a "one in a million accident", it's more like a "one in sixty-six" accident.
That's not even counting all the criticality accidents and fuel losses that lead to the release of radioactive material.
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That's not true. 1.5% of all commercial power producing nuclear reactors ever built have melted down.
How many of those that melted down were third generation civil nuclear power plants? We don't measure the safety of new Tesla cars based on that of old Ford trucks. If you want to make a case against new nuclear power then bring up data showing new nuclear power is not safe. Showing old nuclear reactors are not safe is merely making the case better for new nuclear. You are lumping them all together as if they are equal when they are not. 3 failures out of 200 is a 1.5% failure rate, I'm not going to cl
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1.5% of all commercial power producing nuclear reactors ever built have melted down.
How many of those that melted down were third generation civil nuclear power plants? Showing old nuclear reactors are not safe is merely making the case better for new nuclear.
It doesn't matter what generation they are, because 1) the latest constructed designs are not immune to failure and 2) new designs, new problems.
Third generation reactors didn't start to show up until about 1990.
Failures tend to crop up in any system as it ages, it doesn't matter if it's a car or a nuclear reactor. In some cases the failures are unforeseen. Few third generation reactors have been built, and both of the first ones to be constructed have since been shut down and not restarted due to seismic damage, and concerns over the potential for a recurrence.
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You are still telling me we solved global warming. I just want to be clear that we are arguing over the merits of nuclear power, not the need for it to solve global warming, because we solved global warming already. We solved global warming, don't you agree? If so then we can continue about how nuclear power plays a role. If we did not solve global warming then you need to back up and explain how it is we have the luxury to not use nuclear power. If we can't get the energy we need without nuclear power
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We have not solved AGW. 1.5 deg C is frankly a lot more than we should be accepting, 1.8 is a more likely best-case scenario at this point, and I'm skeptical we'll keep it down to that. We have various technologies which would let us fight AGW meaningfully if we employed them, and we would do better faster by not building any additional nuclear plants. We probably should not have built any additional nuclear since approximately the mid-eighties, at which point solar technology was sufficiently advanced that
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We have not solved AGW.
Oh, really? What makes you think that?
We have various technologies which would let us fight AGW meaningfully if we employed them, and we would do better faster by not building any additional nuclear plants.
Right, and we would have done so much better if we weren't distracted by all those dangerous nuclear power plants built since the 1980s. How many people died building these reactors? I know about Fukushima and Chernobyl but those were not built in the 1980s.
You provide no data, only conflicting claims. We didn't solve global warming so we need to do more. We can't build nuclear power plants because get got this solved without them. If we don't need nuclear power t
We still solved the problem. (Score:2)
All of these have life cycle CO2 less than nuclear, some only one third of nuclear:
First, I can pull numbers from my ass too. Where did you get those numbers? What are the units on those numbers? Nuclear power is not in the the list, so how does nuclear power compare? If solar PV is 41 and nuclear fission is 42 then why should I give a shit? The fossil fuel alternatives are far worse so using nuclear fission would still be a vast improvement.
Second, assuming that's true nuclear power is still safer than all those options. If it's solar at 41 units and nuclear at 42 units but nuclear
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"First, I can pull numbers from my ass too. Where did you get those numbers?"
There is something perverse about someone who posts a reference link and then doesn't bother to read from it. Those are the wikipedia numbers. The numbers are min, median and max. I choose to look at the maximum numbers for each because that is the worst case scenario for each form of energy production and their life cycle CO2 equivalent.
Nuclear [wikipedia.org] 3.7 12 110
Still solved (Re:We still solved the problem.) (Score:2)
From your link:
Nuclear power is one of the leading low carbon power generation methods of producing electricity, and in terms of total life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions per unit of energy generated, has emission values comparable to or lower than renewable energy.[250][251] A 2014 analysis of the carbon footprint literature by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that the embodied total life-cycle emission intensity of nuclear power has a median value of 12 g CO2eq/kWh, which is the lowest among all commercial baseload energy sources .[249][252] This is contrasted with coal and natural gas at 820 and 490 g CO2 eq/kWh.[249][252] From the beginning of its commercialization in the 1970s, nuclear power has prevented the emission of about 64 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent that would have otherwise resulted from the burning of fossil fuels in thermal power stations.
(I added the bold formatting to the quote.)
We are going to need baseload power, and nuclear power has the lowest CO2 emissions of all the options available to us. That tells me that we will be building more nuclear power plants. You disagree? Okay then, that means we solved global warming by some other means. We will just charge up our future Toyotas with solar power I guess.
Problem solved!
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Anyone want to tell me I'm wrong?
You're wrong. And no, I'm going to explain it again. You already have access to the counter-arguments that destroy most of what you said. Look them up!
I'll give you one hint, though: Look up the complete cost of nuclear power, that includes all the costs, instead of just linking to the cost of production without even checking to see if it says what you want. Uou should have noticed the words where it says "Typically pricing of electricity from various energy sources may not include all external costs
We went over this already, problem solved! (Score:2)
I get it, we solved global warming. So what's the point of your argument?
When you say "look them up" then I just get the same information I posted before. You need to give some new information to look up or I keep getting the same results I posted. Since I'm not the only person reading this it would be helpful to others that will "look them up" to know what they are looking for. This is a discussion with more than you and me in it, share with the others so they can keep up too.
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You are arguing that renewables are intermittent on a story about the mass production of energy storage devices.
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You are arguing that renewables are intermittent on a story about the mass production of energy storage devices.
If you don't have reliable energy for the battery factories then the factories are just building batteries to keep the factories running.
There has to be enough return on investment or people will look someplace else. If a solar powered battery factory is eating up 5% of battery production to keep the factory open, and wind eats 4%, hydro eats 3%, geothermal eats 2%, and nuclear eat 1% then the people running the factory will want nuclear power because it means they can ship out more product. That's a simp