Slashdot Mirror

Then why is it there is no current lithium recycling operation in the US? Currently only one company in the WORLD, in Belgium has a process for recycling lithium-ion batteries. http://www.altenergystocks.com...

My steatement

Nobody recycles batteries for the lithium. A small amount get recycled for cobalt

your link

The Umicore battery recycling technology
“Product” is comprised of an alloy that’s refined into cobalt, nickel and other metals

And exactly why

http://www.altenergystocks.com...

Battery Chemistry
        Metal Value Per Ton
Lithium cobalt oxide $25,000
Lead acid $1,400
Lithium iron phosphate $400
Lithium manganese $300

The batteries aren't being recycled for the lithium.

Hope you didn't put too much of your money in Tesla

This is not really about the use of Lion batteries. So Facebook is going to change out lead-acid systems that give ~20-30 minutes (MY guess, TFA does not say) to one that gives only 90 seconds for generator start.

That 'dragster' remark is cute but it falls flat with me. There is a whole class of real-world fail opened up here. 90 seconds is scarcely enough time for humans to respond, let alone diagnose and solve a problem. As a critical infrastructure IT admin I'd never want to commit to this. It is an example of one of those 'Faustian bargain' compromises over time that are making modern technology fragile (in a sneaky way that is no one's fault) , where the UPS maintainers are 'absolved' of responsibility for the Big Fail when it happens. Blame is shifted onto the generator maintainers --- who might have been able to solve the problem had they had more than 90 seconds in which to do so.

Not to mention that lead-acid batteries are mostly water and non-combustible sulfuric acid. A Li-Ion battery fire is 50 times nastier than a lead-acid battery fire, and produces a hell of a lot more noxious gases.

If you design a commercial class server farm without a physical fire/vapor room/wall between batteries and servers and a real DC bus you have already lost the battle, abandoned Bell Standard Practice. I remember when telling someone they were violating BSP was the worst thing you could say. Now it's like, "Bell Standard Practice? What's that? Look it's cool, we just unpack this stuff from the box, snap it together and it works!" Until it doesn't. Or a single battery catches fire and you have to clear the room and don moon suits.

There are other issues too. It's an environmental loser. If you're championing Lion over lead acid for vehicles you're a winner because there is no other way. But this move to install Lion over lead-acid in places where the additional sqft is available is silly. Lead acid maintenance and recycling is a no-brainer. But Lion? Taks a look at this article on state-of-the-art battery hazards and recycling. "it takes 6 to 10 times more energy to reclaim metals from some recycled batteries than it does to produce it through other means, including mining" and thus only a few companies are doing it, probably living on subsidy. The Lion boom is driven by China's rare earth industry, and you can be sure they'll turn the screws when assimilation is complete. There are even some who claim that due to economic reality, many Lion batteries, even the heavy duty ones, are dangerously destined for the landfill, a place lead-acid batteries do not go because their recycle process is mature and chemically simple.

So from here it really looks like Facebook is trying to eliminate a few blue-collar battery maintainer positions in their Data Center, at great cost, to their ultimate peril. Never mind that extra time to keep servers running while you fix faults, just chuck the old stuff, install these things, and... relax. The Big Fail will be no one's fault because the accountants have signed off on it.

Story of the modern world.

I still think celluloistic ethanol production is most promising as you can grow for the most biomass/m2.

Ethanol is a dream, and a dumb one. We should be making biodiesel and butanol, but we are not due to corporate malfeasance and greed.

I guess i shouldn't have said ethanol, just culloistic fuels in general. What is butanol? I'm looking at VW or Audi's tdi (turbo diesel) right now for the next car.

I still think celluloistic ethanol production is most promising as you can grow for the most biomass/m2.

Ethanol is a dream, and a dumb one. We should be making biodiesel and butanol, but we are not due to corporate malfeasance and greed.

These don't seem like people gungho on preventing the release of this technology...are you tinfoil-hatting?

No, I'm informed, which is what you would have been if you knew how to use google.

Let's see some Butanol.

Let's see the money the US government spent on biodiesel research at Sandia NREL in the 1980s bear some fruit.

Batteries are expensive but just having enough power during the day to recharge and keep at least some level of refrigeration would be nice. In Japan it is mandatory for inverters to provide a power outlet for emergencies.

From: http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/2012/09/sma_solars_transformerless_inverter_provides_power_during_outages_1.html

SMA Solar Technology AG (ETR:S92) will begin limited shipments of the transformerless Sunny Boy 3000/4000/5000TL-US-22 inverter series for 3 to 5 kiloWatt rated AC power PV systems in 4Q12. The TL-US series has added a unique Emergency Power Supply feature providing daytime power to a dedicated power socket in the event of a grid power outage. The power socket is isolated from the grid during the outage and supplies up to 12 Amps so long as the PV system is generating. Grid tied inverters without battery storage support are supposed to shutdown during grid power outages to prevent islanding. SMA developed the feature in accordance with solar inverter specifications required to enter the Japanese market after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Interesting. But from their own site "ensure that your recycling is done here in NA, and not in developing countries!", indicating that the standard operating procedure is exactly what I described.

It's nice to know apple has such a proactive stance. Thank you for the correction, though the hostile tone is disgraceful and you should be ashamed.

I am curious to know, since you seem so well informed, how much does SIMS charge apple for this service, and does apple have to subsidise the battery removal process? If so, how much margin has apple set aside for this process, and is their business model able to handle widespread employmet of their applecare recycling program?

(Or, is it more like I suspect, and more a numbers game betting that most apple purchasers won't make use of this "free" service, and that the added costs of recycling in NA are recouped with a higher sales price?)

(Also, many of the removed components can *only* be recycled in developing countries, or be hugely subsidised due to environmental protection laws. Things like the LiON battery itself.)

I look forward to your insightful answer!

Evidence police, stop it right there! http://www.altenergystocks.com/archives/AIVs.bmp This .bmp shows the rough breakdown of the energy consumption of a car during it's lifetime. As you can see, just a very small fraction is embodied energy cost - most is gasoline.
If you disagree and blame the source of the graph, i invite you to calculate it yourself taking the energy content of gasoline ,some easy number for consumption, and the average mass + composition of a car.
In other words, it's blatantly untrue that embedded energy cost makes high efficiency vehicles waste energy.

As a second point of note - the "cash for clunkers" program can be a great idea - in my country (Slovak Rep.) it was done by our last government - it succeeded to keep our automobile manufacturing at work , and fixed the problem of us having one of the worst vehicle parks in europe , with tons of people riding such grandpas like Wartburg, Skoda 105, Skoda 120, polish Fiat, and various old Lada models, all of them 25+ years old and in crappy condition.
I am not an enviromentalist at all, but do give credit where it is due.

Can you say geothermal? Like nuclear power plants geothermal power plants generate steam which turns turbines. So, pro-nuke hysteria just means more nuclear power plants are built causing more pollution. However more powerful is the negawatt. Every watt not needed is one less watt that has to be generated. And the negawatt pays off faster than any energy source.

Falcon

Are you talking about pumped storage or simply using a traditional power plant to cover the difference.

I didn't mention any particular method of storing energy but there are a number being worked on. Besides fuel cells, where excess energy is used to produce hydrogen, there's thermal energy storage, ultra capacitors which someone above mentioned may become feasible, and other methods of energy storage. I think one of the more promising sources for baseload power is geothermal. The Department of Energy [pdf] says "Because geothermal can provide a large amount of sustainable, indigenous, clean, base load and affordable energy for the nation"

Falcon

PVs are no god-send, but they are better than oil and coal in that area.

Run your numbers again. You are incorrect.

Wind farms are neither disruptive nor noisy, provided you put them in the right place and build them right. Even older ones are silent when about half a mile away. Considering that they're built in the middle of nowhere, either on pastures, the ocean or mountain/hill passes, that's not an issue. How do I know? I bike past them about once a month. The real issue though is that when something does go wrong, it results in some spectacular failures.

You've obviously never been around the large-scale ones in western Texas.

I'm wondering though - who is the idiot who put a tidal generator into a lake?

Great Lakes plans have been developed. South Korea also tried it with the creation of Shihwa Lake - though admittedly that's more of putting a huge freaking dam on an ocean inlet, rather than a "true" lake.

And an earthquake that raises or lowers the ocean floor by more than a few feet is more than just "simple tectonic activity"... It's tectonic activity that will ruin the entire area.

Perhaps you would do better to relearn stuff you should have been aware of in second grade. The earth regularly changes - when it moves smoothly, you don't notice too much (until you find something like this, and you don't usually see the "day to day" effects because the soil and even some of the bedrock may slide along on top of the plate itself. However, the effects of all of the boundaries (as well as "hot spot" eruptions) mean that the plates sink and rise quite regularly, and wobble as well, and changes in the water line based on this are not unusual at all.

Biomass energy is not generated from edible food. Or at least, those who suggest it ought to be shot (see corn ethanol).

Agreed.

Biomass energy is generally generated by decomposition of fecal matter and refuse plant matter - think corn stalks.

The "refuse plant matter" and "fecal matter" you refer to, however, normally make their way back into the food system as compost and manure (they're what makes farmers' fields steam in the morning during the pre-planting season). Without these, we'd quickly deplete the soil on many farms and we'd have a major problem, which makes them far less of a "great source" of energy than you're giving them credit for. About the best idea is the collection of waste heat in the composting process, but so far with the exception of some amazingly energy-rich poo (such as elephant dung) the numbers don't work out. The capture of methane in the decomposition process has also been attempted, but overall results haven't been truly encouraging on that front either.

And I don't know anybody who creates animal feed from wood chips.... unless they're criminals.

However, you would get more energy back from wood chips if you simply would burn them, say in a stove or wood heater, rather than wasting time, effort, and chemicals trying to make ethanol from them.

I have to say, I've noticed that those who complain the most about being buried by unfair modding seem to be little more than barely literate trolls who communicate their lack of knowledge through caps, insults and repetitions of long-debunked myths. In other words, they are for whom moderation was introduced.

I have to say, I've noticed that there is an overwhelming political bias on Slashdot, and that the inevitable result of not bowing down to the left-wing sacred cows is that the moderation system gets abused, with people modding "-1 Troll" simply because they disagree with what is being said, especially if it's phrased intelligently and gets in the way of their foaming-mouthed "Chimpy McHalliBusHitler" ranting.