Contradictions with EV’s

Thermoguy wrote:


The Idaho National Labs in ID developed a process to recycle and reuse spent Nuclear fuel and make it a much much cleaner process - the government shut the program down when Clinton was president...

In addition, I know of 2 places in the US where spent nuclear waste is buried, 1 is near the Columbia River in WA, the the other is at the INL in Idaho - which is near Yellowstone and on top of the fresh water aquifer that feeds the Snake River...

But, please, trust our government to do the right thing.

I'm not sure if this is come up on this thread. Most of the Lithium used in EV's comes from Communist China. I'm sure that won't cause any problems in the future, either politically, or just thinking of shipping containers of Lithium traveling thousands of miles over the ocean.

SEE the following.. HERE

At a press conference on August 12th, 1986, US President Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’”

While sort of said "tongue and cheek" sort of a way, there is a lot of wisdom to be gained to not take everything said or printed by any government to be 100% "for your benefit".

The reality is the majority of the spent fuel rods are living in "temporary" cooling pools "wet storage" on site at each nuclear plant and very little if any has ever been moved to final cold storage. At this time they have zero plans on what the next step is and much of that comes from the 24,000 yrs half life of some of the materials in the rods.

While I would love to embrace alternate power like Nuclear, solar, hydro, wind they truly are not as environmentally friendly as they have been made out to be.

Solar panels use the same methods as making your computer processor, but it is done on a massive scale. That scaling up means massive amounts of heavy metals and highly toxic gasses and compounds must be created, used, then disposed of.

Solar panels also use specialized low iron glass for better energy transfer which requires major changes in how the glass is made and higher refined materials. The cells within the panel must be encapsulated to prevent moisture damage in a plastic.. That plastic uses oil or gas hydro carbon fractions like any other plastic.

Panels when damaged or are no longer producing enough or any power will need to be replaced over time and then you have to figure out how to discard or recycle that mess. Granted supposedly 20 yrs on a panel but a windstorm, tornado, hurricane or even a lightning strike can kill that whole solar farm in an instant creating huge amounts of e waste.

Then consider what happens to all of the gas and diesel that isn't used if zero fossil fuel vehicles were allowed?

Gas and diesel are only a small fraction out of a barrel of crude oil and would now be a unused product which would have to be disposed of.. You cannot simply shut down every oil and gas well and never pump any ever again without affecting every part of your life.

Every single medicine on the market actually starts out using hydro carbon fractions from gas and oil production to build on. Your vehicle tires use oil and gas fractions. Your asphalt pavement you drive on would no longer be available.

Back in the 1880s crude oil was pumped and refined to just to get Kerosene which replaced whale oil for lamps, everything else was discarded.. Gasoline (aka Naptha) was flared off and heavy leftovers were dumped. Today, nearly 99.9% of a barrel of crude has very useful products and byproducts..