As probably everyone knows, Netherlands is very flat and Norway very mountaneous. Norways is also very rainy. So it's a match made in heaven - Norway's mountain reservoirs can act as balancers for dutch wind power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBRAcable
While Denmark in term essentially is a trading hub for electricity between Scandinavia, the UK and continental Europe.
Amazing.
Still, if module prices continue falling, even at poor capacity factors lime 10%, it'll be increasingly hard to justify paying such high prices to move energy around the continent; local overprovisioning and storage will be cheaper even if Norway is willing to produce the energy for free.
At first I thought you meant "embodied energy" or some such.
Iceland "exports" geothermal energy by converting bauxite ore into aluminum.
Australian could "export" renewable energy by domestically converting iron ore into steel.
Local ressilence is needed in any case and mass produced batteries can provide that safety.
No it doesn't.
Magnesium metal burns because the boiling point of magnesium is just 1091 C, so extremely reactive vapor is readily produced. But it would be very hard to heat it that high in water unless it was ignited first. It will then continue to burn under water.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/33167/why-does-b...
If a hypothetical ship full of magnesium sinks without catching the magnesium on fire first, the magnesium will probably not catch fire from exposure to water. Perhaps if it's sufficiently finely divided, which seems like a bad idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion “At least 1,782 people, largely in Halifax and Dartmouth, were killed by the blast, debris, fires, or collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured.”
“Nearly all structures within an 800-metre (half-mile) radius, including the community of Richmond, were obliterated.[3] A pressure wave snapped trees, bent iron rails, demolished buildings, grounded vessels (including Imo, which was washed ashore by the ensuing tsunami), and scattered fragments of Mont-Blanc for kilometres. Across the harbour, in Dartmouth, there was also widespread damage.[4] A tsunami created by the blast wiped out a community of Mi'kmaq who had lived in the Tufts Cove area for generations.”
It seems unlikely to happen by accident because at stoichiometry you need more water than magnesium, and I don't think spontaneous explosion is a real risk with magnesium. The International Magnesium Association's safe handling guide https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.intlmag.org/resource/resmgr/safety... does mention that magnesium swarf can spontaneously combust in the presence of water, but I think swarf is too coarse to explode. It recommends keeping wet magnesium swarf under water to prevent it from heating up enough to spontaneously ignite.
But presumably you'd be shipping the magnesium in the form of plates, ingots, or rolls rather than powder, swarf, or loose foil.
Same issue with grain silos exploding because of the mixture of fuel with oxygen, but flour just burns etc.
Small hydrogen balloons do not in fact go bang; they just create small conflagrations. What goes bang are small balloons filled with a near-stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, such as you get from the simplest forms of water electrolysis.
The stoichiometric mixture of magnesium with water is 1.36 grams of water per gram of magnesium (which is 1.74g/cc, so this 58-wt%-water mixture is 70% water by volume), the enthalpy of formation of H₂O is -285.83kJ/mol, and the enthalpy of formation of MgO is -601.6kJ/mol. So this reaction:
Mg + H₂O → MgO + H₂
yields 315.8kJ/mol, which is to say, 315.8kJ per 24.3 grams of magnesium, or per 58 grams of mixture, about 5.4MJ/kg, about an 18% higher energy density than TNT. And the hot hydrogen gas produced will carry the heat produced by the reaction into nearby areas, igniting them and resulting in a flame propagation velocity that's higher than thermal conduction alone.For a large enough particle size, you won't get an explosion, and you may even lose most of your water as steam; but for a small enough particle size and an oxidizer concentration close enough to stoichiometric, you will. Some nanothermites consisting of magnesium nanoparticles with an oxidizer such as iron oxide even reliably detonate.
So, it's a potential safety hazard, but it seems like one that should be easy enough to guard against.
Sure but nobody is going to ship large quantities of magnesium like that: “Use proper packaging: Ensure the magnesium is sealed in moisture-proof, airtight containers.” https://www.freightamigo.com/blog/hs-code-for-containing-at-...
> Small hydrogen balloons do not in fact go bang
It’s not a supersonic detonation but even normal balloons pop with a small bang, pure hydrogen balloons are louder. Though a you mention hydrogen + oxygen is significantly more extreme.
Are you sure the parent isn't referring to something like a rust (iron-air) battery? Aluminum, Iron, and Magnesium are all viable battery chemistries.
Side note - I'm pretty certain you don't actually need to make contents of a ship explode to easily sink it with explosives.
I'm actually somewhat concerned that between drones and smart mines - we've never had a better chance of completely ruining our ability to do ocean based shipping during combat.
The metal fuels in particular have the merit that you can use them in precisely such mass-produced batteries rather than to produce thermal power. As I alluded to in my grandparent comment, aluminum-air batteries were mass-produced in the 01960s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
But the problem mentioned above was about war.
In the Drone Age, though, you can remotely pilot a quadcopter 4300 km away to blow up airplanes on the airstrip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb — or to blow up your political opposition, if you can guess where they are or will be. The US has been doing this for 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq: https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/former-drone-operators-s... (use Readability mode to bypass "this is not a paywall") but a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper costs on the order of US$100 million, so there are less than 400 of them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-9_Reaper#In... while Ukraine's most popular drones cost on the order of US$300, can be 3-D printed in a basement, already cause 70% of casualties on the battlefield, and are produced in volumes approaching 10 million per year https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/.... Many experts believe drones have made tanks obsolete on the battlefield https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJRqXBhnvCs.
Even without autonomous weapons, we're rapidly moving toward the future of borderless war without end so vividly envisioned in Slaughterbots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA. Ukraine is already an order of magnitude past the headline number it opens with, "Customer pilots directed almost 3,000 precision strikes last year."
If you want to see what precision strikes on the Ukrainian battlefield look like, plenty of Ukrainian military units have posted fundraising videos, so you can watch terrified conscripts dying all day long if you want to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjIgTJ-73v4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhQBf4VFMwI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A64TmBvbn1Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXUqJAnAP9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCoCxARDEio.
Those videos are a preview of what life will be like for you and your family in the years to come as war becomes borderless.
This consequently scales down the scale of any spill or security issue.
Like the difference between nicking a capillary and nicking an aorta.
GPS is fairly easy to jam, and despite the purported end of Selective Availability, unencrypted GPS can be turned off entirely without affecting US military GPS. Cruise missiles have been using terrain models for decades now, since well before GPS (a major reason high-resolution DTED used to be classified) which just requires a computationally cheap particle filter and appropriate sensors. We can expect belligerents in upcoming conflicts to maintain strategic stockpiles of the relevant electronics, which are more compact than even cocaine or fentanyl and therefore difficult to blockade.
https://www.oldsaltblog.com/2024/08/apex-boats-the-unlikely-...
"On the landing beach at Baie de Pampelonne, most Apex boats exploded against the obstacles. Nevertheless, one ran aground, and one sank. A third reversed course and turned back out to sea before exploding near Sub-chaser #1029 and severely damaging it."
One could argue all those Mk 14 torpedoes that malfunctioned and went onto circular paths also counted.
EDIT: To make things clearer, the word Missile is quite old, and predates rockets. missile is any object that is propelled somehow to hit a target. So even a stone launched from a sling by a caveman is already a missile. The other guy mentioned precision guided missiles though... and he is still correct in the word usage there.
However, the distinction is usually applied where aircraft become missile’s when the attack can no longer be aborted.
> However, the distinction is usually applied where aircraft become missile’s when the attack can no longer be aborted.
So for a quadcopter that's a pretty negligible amount of time. And not all that much for tiny planes either.