5,493 karma · joined July 29, 2010
There has never been a single geothermal lithium project that was actually successful.
There are very, very few cases where BEV will not work. BEV is also much, much, cheaper to operate, so even if its not optimal BEV will still be used over FCV.
In those few remote location that you mention (likely a lot less then 1% of the market), gasoline will simply be used. The investment in hydrogen for such a minimal case makes no sense.
It was the wrong curve. RP1 based engines like F-1 would have been far better to get of the ground.
> The overall package was compromised by USAF / .mil requirements but otherwise was an advanced product for its time.
There were many mistakes made. Space fans love to blame the military and politics. But if you actually go back, NASA leadership made plenty of questionable choices.
The biggest issue with the shuttle is the basic architecture.
Tesla tried to get into lithium extraction before and it didn't work.
I think Tesla will eventually get this working, but not sure if its actually gone compete with Western Australian spodumene or Atacama brines.
However I think the process looks pretty promising.
Not to mention the EV version will give you a much better driving experience and not be unhealthy to people, specially in cities.
We are just at the start of the S curve adoption, and most cars sold are not sold for £17k but rather £30-40k. For that cost EV are already better.
Most people in cities don't use their cars much either. Tesla is already building super chargers in cities. If you only drive in cities and you really only park at spot where there is no charging, and you can't charge at work. You can just go charging at a super charger once a week or so.
To suggest hydrogen is a better option because of this very limited single concern, public parking in cities, is crazy in my opinion. Also the city could let a company do it as long as they get part of the money, and in fact this is already what many companies are doing.
Consider actually reading it, this is pointed out in the text.
> by presenting something that's rather mediocre and mundane
0% of global lithium is produced from clay extraction. But I guess its so mediore and mundane that you could easily do it.
> Elon Musk that didn't turn out to involve some kind of clever fraud
Like when they delivered Astronauts to the Spacestation. Everybody know that that is actually filmed in a desert in Nevada.
> But apparently a substantial part of today's (global) society just loves to be fooled
Or you know, maybe you are not as smart as you think you are. I know witch one is more likely.
https://www.patreon.com/thelimitingfactor/posts
It will be like a week or so until it will come out.
There is an older video on the topic as well. About Clay mining and potential processes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdvE-UA-xw4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YuCK1SJG5gc
And an interview with somebody in the industry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfffip_4C80
There are certainty people in the industry skeptical of this. No commercial lithium is currently produce from Clay and not with DLE processes. Tesla process will likely require both. While the process Tesla outline is likely possible, if they can do it as cheaply as existing process is questionable.
Other companies work on process along the same line, but generally use ACID instead.
Joe Lowry from Global Lithium Podcast is very skeptical. He is a industry veteran having worked with Tesla in the past as well. If you want to learn about the lithium industry, I would suggest:
He far better sources on Tesla then most people. Certainty most other websites that run with this news. He has broken news on Tesla multiple times.
Electrek has strongly moved in the direction of covering all EV launches and reporting on all of that while giving good press to all the other automakers. Accusing them of being just a Tesla fanblog is simply wrong.
Maybe 5 years ago when Tesla was the only game in town this was more correct, but its not today.
The main issue they had is basically that the NK-17 engines were not tested before flight. Even worse, since they didn't have good computer back then, their 'what happens if an engine fails' sequence was very sub-optimal.
I would suggest only one of the N-1 failures can reasonable be attributed to the choice in engine configuration. In one case their internal fuel channels were breaking because of vibration.
All of these things seem much less likely to happen. The Booster has a computer and each engine has its own control. The Booster is much more capable of handing an engine shutdown or even an exploding engine. That has been demonstrated on the Falcon 9 a number of time.
Each engine is individually tested before the flight and often they are then fired together on the ground, so there is much less fear of that.
They have experience with 27 engines and the pipes required. Also, the Super Heavy used short Stainless steel tubes that should be fairly resilient. In general our engineering on how do this is just much better, better simulation, more experience, better knowledge oft the materials and the welding.
- Gwynne Shotwell
- Tom Mueller
- Eric Berger
The other failure (non-mission) was when they discovered a real unkown-unkown about COPV tanks and helium tanks in near 0-kelvin temperatures.
So yeah, they should not have made that mistake, but its also the case that nobody has a perfect record. Considering the errors most rocket companies have made, theirs seem fairly reasonable.
The whole reason for the full-flow staged cycle is to have much more reasonable internal temperatures. Methane as well was picked partially because its far more clean burning.
There is no reason rocket engines couldn't be as reliable a jet engines.
> far more fuel
RP1 is very expensive. Methane is much cheaper, and they can even produce it local. Ox is very cheap and is basically gone turn into the cost of electricity and they are using local solar to make it.
Helium is also a very expensive part of the Falcon 9. Starship avoids the use of helium.
Additionally the Falcon 9 used TEE-TAB that is also expensive.
And it used nitrogen as well, that not expensive but just one more thing to worry about.
Falcon 9 has 6 different different consumables, Starship has 2.
> generally more expense in all the ground operations
This is wrong. The Falcon needed to have drone ships operating and tug boats for them as well, to catch the fairing they have another 1-2 boats out there to collect the fairing.
Then the stages need to be brought into port, transported back to the launch site and so on. The fairing have to be refurbished as well.
In additional Starship has multiple design upgrades that make it actually easier. Unlike Falcon 9 Upper stage, the Starship will be fueled from below, meaning there is no secondary fuel infrastructure for the upper stage. Not requiring the fueling of the consumables above also makes it much easier.
Plus they were able to apply everything they learned from Falcon 9 and ground operations to this new launch vehicle and launch site.
> In a world where this can be launched for $2M, Falcon 9 can be launched for less than $1M.
Falcon 9 can not do that. First of all, you need to build an upper stage that cost you 5-10M. You can't build that Upper stage fast enough to reach the required flight rate. Falcon 9 is also more difficult to launch and prep for launch. It wasn't designed to be fully reusable and still need more checks and refurbishments.
Now $2M is extreme, even if it is $10M or $20M that only really matters for stuff like Mars. If you can launch it anywhere under $100M its revolutionary vehicle for space flight.
A few bureaucrats from specific regions made some comments but nothing series.
Also, about the 'spying thing' this was reasonably thing by the government not to allow Tesla in military bases in China, this is no different then things like IPhones not being allowed there.
There was never concern that they would 'shutdown' Tesla.
Tesla has great support from the city and location they are in and pretty good relationship with the central government.
If anything, Tesla has most problems with German environmental (anti progress) groups and the bureaucracy there.
Switzerland is next to Germany, and has almost no union and there is not so much difference in overall standard of living and how workers are treated.
The idea that Unions are this universal good and talking negative about them is simply being anti-worker pro-capitalist exploitation is a tiered talking point.
It is really only once Iraq was defeated, that Israel turned hard against Iran. Israel is simply always against the biggest potential power in the middle east.
Iran has multiple times put these things up for negotiation but the US has systematically refused such attempts.
To be fair. The US does a whole lot of that itself. The US even helped to transport al-Qaeda troupes from Lybia to Syria.
The DoD and CIA both had massive programs to push weapons into Syria, much of them ended up in Al Nusra and ISIS hands.
This is also not new, the US used extremist groups in the 90s under Clinton in the balkan and to support the Chechens.
Plus you could easily replace it with solar produced methanol overtime.
EV however killed the need for that for the most part.
Today I don't really think synfuels have much of a application. Batteries and storing energy electrically will win. It will not be so long until you can basically do Iron-Silicon battery for a very cheap price. Or if we finally figure Sulfer we could have amazing batteries for super cheap.
The whole main concept why so many people think flow batteries are so awesome for gird storage is that you can basically have a tank size can scale arbitrary.
The once that actually have some reasonably big pilot are Vanadium redox battery. There are multiple such batteries being developed.
There are also a number of startups who try these flow batteries but try to move away from Vanadium. Li-Ion batteries are collapsing in price so fast, that they have killed of many of these ideas, like the Zebra battery. So newer startups are looking at something cheaper.
But the approach of scaling many smaller ones might still work, it just basically defeats the main benefit of flow batteries in the first place.
Some of the companies who wanted to build large scale flow batteries have had a lot of problems in the last decade and very few to non have managed to do it.
RedFlow seems to have some aspiration for grid scale but it seems to just assemblies of smaller batteries, rather then what most companies hope a flow battery for the grid to look like.