[orbital-decay]

>Surface mining also has environmental consequences which have to be weighed against the costs of deep sea mining.

What will actually happen is both types will be happily used at the same time, so there's little point in weighting one against the other.

Any other rationalization misses the fact that this is an extremely poorly understood environment (especially if we do compare with surface mining). It's never a good idea to tinker with unknown at scale without understanding it first, let alone commercializing it. Mining history is practically written in mistakes like that.

[culi]

Right. Especially as we ramp up our reliance on solar panels (and therefore batteries). These operations are now heavily subsidized and we'll likely be making 100% use of every avenue available to mine as much as possible as soon as possible

sigh. If only we put this much funding into solving our exploding e-waste crisis which could also help alleviate the problems of rare metals

[elil17]

I don't think it's true that both will be used at once - if deep sea mining is cheap enough, it could make surface mining non-viable. A carbon tax could certainly eliminate surface mining because smelting surface minerals uses so much more energy compared to smelting nodules.

We actually put much more funding into e-waste recycling. Allseas most recent funding round was $150m, and they're the only major player in the deep sea mining space. But Redwood materials, one of many e-waste recycling startups, has raised $700m in their most recent round.

[jeffbee]

We don't need weird elements to support solar with batteries. Grid stabilization can do fine with lead-acid batteries. Both lead and sulfur are readily available. There are also iron batteries and other emerging battery chemistries, as well as non-battery storage like pumped liquids or pressurized gases.

[Robotbeat]

Don’t need manganese or any rare minerals for batteries. Lithium iron phosphate batteries are used in the least expensive Teslas (base Model 3 and Y), and although lithium is very abundant, you can even substitute it for the even more abundant Sodium with only a slight weight increase. That’s superior to Lead based batteries in nearly every way.

[pfdietz]

Manganese is not a rare mineral. One does not mine manganese nodules for the manganese. Mining them would create an enormous surplus of manganese that would get dumped in waste piles.

[Turing_Machine]

Why is a "waste pile" worse than having it distributed all over the ocean floor?

[pfdietz]

I wasn't making a judgment here. I was just pointing out that most of the manganese ends up in the waste stream. One would not be mining these things for the manganese (although what manganese that could be sold would be sold.) In a world mining manganese nodules, the price of manganese would be very low.

[arcticbull]

Or you can reduce your need for batteries by combining wind and solar with green, safe nuclear reactors - and smart grids capable of varying their demand instead of us trying desperately to adjust supply.

For example, as more folks move to electric cars, a smart grid would allow chargers to charge less at periods of intense demand.

We've historically focused exclusively on adjusting supply to meet demand - which is clearly very difficult and very expensive (especially if you look at gas peaker plants) - but we instead (or in addition) can adjust aspects of the demand curve to smooth out variability in load. This should be easier and significantly cheaper.

[s1artibartfast]

Great, if we don't actually need the metals then there will be no one to buy them from the deep sea Miners and the problem will solve itself

[arcticbull]

Sorry if I was unclear I think seafloor mining is an awful idea

[hedora]

Alternatively, keep burning fossil fuels, but overproduce renewables on average, and use the waste energy for carbon capture.

(This has the big advantage of buying time to decarbonize things like concrete, cattle and airplanes.)

[arcticbull]

Wouldn't it be more efficient to not produce the carbon than to produce it on one side and capture it on the other?

[jeffbee]

Whether something is more efficient might not be relevant. What's relevant is whether there is a path from here to there that keeps us under a survivable amount of climate change. Staying on that path may require some decisions that seem superficially inefficient.

[Schroedingersat]

1kg of Lithium in an LFP battery provides diurnal storage for about the same amount of power as 1kg of Uranium can produce, lasts 3x as long, is recyclable, and mining the lithium is less harmful.

[Turing_Machine]

Batteries don't store "power". They store energy. Uranium fission, on the other hand, produces energy. Comparing energy storage with energy production is not valid.

Also, your numbers are way, way off. 1 kg of U-235 can produce about 24,000,000 kWh of energy. There's no way you're going to store that in 1 kg of lithium batteries.

[Schroedingersat]

Hilarious attempt at misdirection. The conceit is that the 'need' for batteries to run renewables is environmentally destructive and makes renewables a bad option. Putting that in context reveals it's still a better option than nuclear, even though there are other options that are even better on the renewable side where they're appropriate.

You don't mine U235. You mine 99.3% U238 and then leave a third of your U235 in enrichment tailings (or burn it straight in a CANDU).

And storage of a given time duration is indexed by power. 1kW of diurnal storage is enough storage to provide 1kW over daily variation.

Extracting 1kg of Uranium nets you 1kW for a few years.

Extracting 1kg of Lithium nets you enough storage to run 1kW of solar + wind for several times as long.

The solar panel is made of about the same amount of sand as goes into the nuclear power plant. It is less limited by Silver than the control rods are limited by indium, silver and cadmium.

[burnished]

You still need batteries to support the solar and wind systems. If making the grid responsive to total load increases efficiency then hell, let’s do both

[Schroedingersat]

Abundant battery chemistries are already most of the way through commercialisation. ZnBr, Sodium/Prussian blue, Iron flow, and Iron air are all proven practial and rapidly scaling. AlS, NaS and LiS are hopeful next steps.

The only critical mineral not yet eliminated for the most commercially viable upcoming option is silver which requires about one ounce per net kilowatt with state of the art processes.

Unless you meant cheap energy will subsidize mining, in which case you are correct and this is a problem.