| HN Mirror

People are trying to find alternatives to cobalt. Lithium ion in general too cause it's density is not as good as we need it to be for grid scale & automotive use-cases. But that's all forward looking stuff. Nothing in your links suggests cobalt is getting removed. If anything it shows that the % of worldwide cobalt mining being used for batteries is growing - in other words, batteries are dominating the need for cobalt. I don't have any specific knowledge of mining, so I don't know cobalt specifically, but my understanding is that cobalt mining is more of a problem based on where the mines are and maybe ecological damage, not so much that mining it is especially dangerous (in other words, conflict prone regions where the mining has the effect of supporting unstable regimes / inhumane conditions / slavery). That's where I'd say uncounted deaths are happening.

Re deaths per tw, keep in mind that for solar 1 person would die every 50 years. So no one dying from carrying panels / laying panels is not really surprising or indicative the numbers are wrong. Also note that most of these numbers are for industrial power generation, not roof-top solar which has a higher fatality rate. But the point is that for wind, solar & nuclear, the death rate in a given year is basically 0 (same actually for hydro because the entire death toll comes from 1 accident). That's important in terms of understanding that the safety profile for this technology is very similar & way way way below oil & gas (& just the numbers attributed directly & ignoring the very large externalities). At numbers that low, it doesn't really matter so much.

> Why doesn't solar+battery provide reliable generation capabilities? There are any number of off-grid solar only projects, it's simply a matter of cost, not capability.

By that logic that's also true for nuclear getting cheaper. The point is not just one of cost (& these plants are fairly expensive but not prohibitively so per se). The point is that we simply can't convert raw materials into batteries fast enough. We're trying to rapidly scale battery manufacturing capacity as quickly as possible, but to date we have 3 plants worldwide right now (2 in Australia & 1 in California which sum up to 700 MW). That's just waaay to small if you're talking about getting things powered by solar reliably globally. Also remember that batteries degrade over time which means it's a 300 MW plant today but in 20 years it's probably a 100 MW plant. It's a pretty big maintenance cost that would need to get factored in. Now comparing batteries to power generation obviously isn't fair because they just need to absorb load for a set amount of time so I don't know if these are small plants individually, but a single nuclear plant can generate GWs of power very easily without any degradation in that generation capability 24/7. Yes - the plant needs to be physically maintained & that's not cheap either - there's no perfect answer. So over time could we get solar + battery to work? Probably. But this shit is going to take a very long time - like maybe by the end of the century we could be 100% renewables. I'm skeptical but it is a possibility - my skepticisim comes from the fact that there are several high temperature manufacturing applications for which renewables don't work at all whereas nuclear can 100% easily replace fossil fuels. Meaningfully investing in nuclear would also have a significant payoff in that we could probably get off of fossil fuels within ~30 years and nuclear tech itself would change massively (molten salt reactors or thorium reactors which fail safe & can't melt down, getting cheaper plants by building more of them because right now we do a single nuclear project after very many many years, direct energy capture to avoid the need of a turbine & water, etc etc).