Electric bus explodes on Paris street
(www.youtube.com)
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Electric vehicles are brilliant for the environment.
Buy lithium mining and processing is not.
Nobody knows how much pollution and toxins are in that smoke. Lithium, aluminium, plastics, polymers and all other forms of man made chemicals, burning away.
Not to mention the fact that ev's currently so nothing for the environment but transfer the source of pollution from one place (the petrol/diesel engine) to the coal/gas/oil power plant.
Green energy my ass.
Eh, it's French, so there's a decent chance the ultimate source of power is nuclear.
Got to say, though, the charge \ discharge cycle on a metropolitan bus has got to be pretty brutal. .Damn thing's running all day.
The entire environmental movement is such an obvious scam that only naive children buy into their doomsday propaganda.
Unfortunately a new crop of those is born every year, ripe for exploitation thanks to their exclusive control of the education and "Science"(TM) apparatuses.
I'm old enough to remember the development of ecology as an academic discipline which emerged around the same time as the social movement that gave rise to "environmentalism."
This process began around 1969-75, when Americans were made aware of the massive scale of industrial pollution and the EPA was created. I can recall when Cleveland's Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, the latest in a series of burning river incidents.
As with all creations of the left, what began as a worthwhile path to environmental protection was co-opted by large corporate interests and the lunatic fringe in the universities and presto! you get climate alarmists, anti-human propagandists and creatures like Greta Thunburg.
Lithium is not consumed by the operation of a battery. It's like mining aluminium - yes, there is pollution is involved in mining it, but once you've got it, you've got it for the next hundred years.
An electric vehicle produces less pollution even if it is entirely powered by coal. A large, stationary power station is more efficient than an internal combustion engine.
lithium is really tough to recycle. Aluminum is not. Lithium for batteries is an ionized crystal oxide. It doesn't particularly want to be in that form and when it has gone through many charge cycles, it must be refabricated. Resmelting, like with aluminum, won't work, because it's not the nature of the base metal to be an ionized crystal oxide. I don't know the cycle, but there is a reason we aren't mass recycling these batteries--the process is not at all economical.
EDIT: Batteries are recycled now, actually. I guess it is more economical than it used to be. Go read how they do it and guess who environmentally friendly it is :D
https://waareeess.com/lithium-ion-battery-recycling/
"After shredding, a “black mass” is obtained, which needs to be processed to extract essential metals like cobalt and nickel. The black mass typically includes a blend of lithium, manganese, cobalt and nickel present in distinct ratios. This process requires an intensive amount of energy, and it also degrades the value of the extracted components."
separating out these metals is actually effectively re-refining the elemental forms of the metals. Which requires settling ponds and industrial quantities of acids. Metal refining is often super noxious and releases a LOT of nasty gasses. After obtaining the elemental form of the metals, each will need to be re-ionized and alloyed, which also requires a lot of energy for the smelt and fabrication. Additional materials will need to be sourced for the packaging and layering.
EDIT 2: Lithium is already ionized naturally, since it's an alkaline metal like cesium, potassium, sodium etc. The chemistry involved with using it in an alloy is nuts and well beyond me.
To remake the electrolyte you need lithium chloride, which can be found naturally in lithium salts (mixed with sodium perchlorate to make lithium perchlorate). Raw lithium would be more useful in making lithium carbonate, which you can use to make the lithium cobalt oxide which is also needed.
perchlorates are nasty nasty business. I wonder how green anything that demands mass amounts of a perchlorate is.
To be fair internal combustion engines do produce actual pollution, and coal plants do have massive fuck off scrubbers (although there's still the problem of ash, which doesn't go into the air but is pollution all the same).
I'm mostly just talking in terms of air quality. I mentioned the ash and slag just to avoid anyone saying "akthually, coal plants..."
Comment Reported for: Rule 2 - Violent Speech
It doesn't look like you were telling a user to kill themselves.
That being said, CO2 is pollution, so is methane, and you produce both, not sure why that's a reason to die...
If you do an Amber Herd and shit the bed, that is still polluting the bed.
Methane, again, is common in the natural world. Yet, shitting in the river still makes the river polluted. Shit also can help make plants grow as fertilizer.
It's still a pollution.
CO2 is absolutely poisonous because it prevents you from getting oxygen.
CO2 is absolutely a pollutant. Nitrogen, which you've already identified helps plants, will also kill you.
My analogy to shit is to point out that something being "natural" doesn't make it not a pollutant. If you don't like "shit" we can go with: uranium (which is naturally occurring and definitely a pollutant), methane (which is also naturally occurring and defini9tely a pollutant), and volcanic ash (which is also naturally occurring and definitely a pollutant)
It is when it burns.
Out of sight, out of mind, my dude.
Bus of peace I see.
Weird, I heard no tell tale of "allahu ackbar", they are getting craftier!
At this point I'm sort of collecting video of vehicle battery explosions and the uncontrollable metallic firestorm that ensues. Some of the most frightening stuff I've ever seen, just volcanic.
I am now firmly thinking that lithium batteries are dangerous at any speed and should not even be allowed much less promoted.
That's some environmentally-friendly CO2-free smoke right there!
Could it be a one in a million fluke that happens with any technology mass produced and left to cheapest method of production? Nah, never that simple.
Mass-produced garbage. Cheapest possible parts/labor are most likely to blame. Like the Boeing planes that kept dropping out of the sky because they sold the safety software separately at an exorbitant rate.
Electric busses go up in flames all the time in Europe.
Just last October a charging electric bus caught on fire and burned down the whole depot with 25 busses in Stuttgart, Germany (auto-translated source).
Those busses aren't exactly mass produced and certainly not cheaply made. They're flag-ship products to get green politicians to pump endless money into the manufacturers.
this is the sort of thing you see in China, not the west.
Burning busses are a common sight in Europe these days. Sometimes it's rioting Muslims, other times it's African migrants, and then there are of course plenty of electric fires.
Those lithium batteries can rupture and if they have any amount of energy density live in them, they'll do that.
It seems rare because EV's make up less than 1% of all the vehicles on the road, but should the EV dream be realized by these government moneygorgers, you can expect this to be quite common.
Look at all that carbon burning
Bus of peace
I'm guessing this is right around the same corner which cold fusion and hydrogen fuel cells are hiding behind?
Oh I remember EEVBlog tearing these things apart. They supply whooping microwatts of power and outside of extreme niche applications like low-power sensors they are absolutely useless.
These types of batteries have also been on the market for quite a while (for legit ultra low power applications). Every now and then some investment scammer tries to claim they're just about to run cell phones and cars with these things. They just need a few more million $ and a couple of years.
So yea, cold fusion and hydrogen cells.