Neither. The cited estimate is from the EIA website where it discusses actual production not any sort of capacity.

There are multiple alternatives to cobalt. The LFP is one, but nickel is proving to be not only a viable replacement for cobalt in current lithium batteries, but actually superior. So even in the medium term, much less the long one, there is no "cobalt" problem.

Could this argument be any vaguer? With any commodity with rapidly expanding demand there are always transient supply pinches, and so observing that we have seen some is not any sort of argument against the viability of lithium batteries, and is not even a price problem for BEVs not even in the short term since they use so little (12 kg in a high end Tesla). Lithium supply does not have any significant "political volatility" (aka Africa) supply problems - probably why you did not name any names. Less than 1% of world supply comes from Africa in 2022, Australia and Chile currently produce 77% of the entire supply. And there is no long term problem either - current known resources is enough to build 9 billion Teslas, and it is expanding rapidly as more exploration is done.

Fairies will make our lithium disappear? Cobalt supply is adequate for the foreseeable future and is on the way out, as you yourself noted above (though you were unaware of nickel replacing cobalt also. By the same token if the fairies stole all of our uranium the nuclear power industry would collapse.

Another one of your long posts of unsupported FUD.

This is a very confused and weak argument.

There is no outrage from just acquiring a nuclear power plant using the existing world system of fuel management (buying enriched uranium from existing producers, and regular monitored spent fuel storage on-site).

And idly speculating that UAE doesn't think solar energy is feasible as a power source because they also are interested in an expensive nuclear plant is bizarre projection. You have argued that nuclear power provides ideal base load in combination with solar for peak power I believe? By this "argument" - the don't believe in X because they are also building Y, one can just easily (and falsely) argue that they don't believe in Y because they are building X.

UAE has money to burn, literally, so they are investing in a diversified power production system - even the very high cost nuclear power option.

Renewable power actually matches up with the needs of fuel production very well since periods of excess production provide very cheap (even free) power to run hydrogen or methane plants that are set up to run intermittently. This is done with aluminium production today for the same reason.

Killer statistic and source. You've read about some dealers currently having trouble selling some BEVs. You don't link to a survey of the actual market because it would anhillate the argument you are trying to push.

From the article I linked to: "BEV sales in all twenty analyzed markets increased by 26% in the third quarter of 2023 in comparison with the same period last year."

Only double digit annual percentage increases? OMG! The BEV market is tanking! Its a fad that is all over! (/s).

Surface transportation uses about ten times the amount of energy as aviation. So you are arguing electric cars are impossible. That argument was lost many years ago. No one seriously questions that transportation can be electrified - it is a matter of discussion of which is the best way to produce the electricity. If you are arguing electrification of transportation is impossible you take yourself off the table as a serious commenter.

So you are arguing that electrification of all transportation, including cars is infeasible? Aviation only uses about 9% of the transportation consumed petroleum. If we can electrify cars, we and have enough electricity to produce fuel for planes.

Simply saying "it takes a lot" is a fatally weak argument.

To start off you can support a significant fraction of regional flights which go from a hub to an outlier airport and back again, with a single fuel load. Do not succumb to the Slashdot disease of arguing that the entire system and all limitations must be overcome at once.

The biggest problem is not permitting very short passwords, but prohibiting long ones that prevent you from using the superior method of pass phrases.

I dunno. Their monopoly ad position gives them the power to force crud down our throats for a long, long time.

This is the driving design criterion?! "We must optimize for people who print maps but don't have a color printer."

Who even prints their Google maps? And I haven't seen a black and white only printer in more than a decade.

Somehow the tech world has become infected with the notion that dark, low contrast color schemes are super-cool! and should be used by everyone everywhere for everything! Like back in the day didn't everyone write of blackboards in various shades of grey chalk?

Because it we currently do not have good models that fit the known structure of the Universe that can explain a particle accelerated to this energy, and be able to keep it long enough to reach Earth from its origin. With particle energies this high interactions with the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation field acts as brakes. We do not "need" unknown physics, but it is one of the options in attempting to resolve this problem.

Roger, you can't be expected to read the TFA - this is /. after all - but you can be expected to read the TFS (and you shouldn't pretend to have read TFA when you clearly didn't). They aren't making cement. They are making calcium oxide to capture CO2 from the air, then calcining the CaCO3 back to CaO while - and this is crucial - "capturing and storing the CO2". This regenerates their CO2 capture bed and allows them to capture and store more CO2. No cement is made in the process.

A more generally useful approach that adopts this same concept would be convince actual cement plants to capture the CO2 they release at the source, but difficult to implement without government mandates and subsidies as the cement plants will need to be protected from the costs of doing so. Cement will eventually recapture about half of the CO2 released, so if the original plant release is captured and stored cement making would become a net sink for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

"Species" is a human invented concept that is necessary to describe and classify the different types living things. Sticking just to multicellular animals, there are a couple of dozen different definitions of species for different purposes. Two animals that cannot produce fertile offspring are definitely different species, but this has always been an inadequate general definition since two isolated populations can develop very different appearances, and behavior long before this genetic point of no return is reached. The Scottish Wildcat has very different appearance and behavior from a house cat, and a house cat is unable to occupy the ecological niche of a Scottish Wildcat -- so it is definitely a different species from a Scottish Wildcat even though it is not genetically isolated from it reproductively.

As a rule of thumb, any two species that have been genetically isolated for a few million years (for example) will have diverged into species with quite different appearance, behavior and ecological range but may not yet have become unable to reproduce together. European domestic cattle and North American Bison for example are hardly considered the same species by anyone, they are even classified in separate genuses, though they can still interbreed readily.

This is exactly what I expected and have publicly predicted based, as it was, on simple economics. NuScale had initially projected lower costs than traditional mega-nuclear plants, but in the last couple of years had admitted that the costs were going to be no better -- efficient construction apparently not offsetting giving up economy of scale. Without a cost advantage over "Old Nuclear" NuScale had no case to make.

And this project could not have contributed significantly to decarbonizing the rest of the U.S. grid, nor provide the necessary scale to support electrification of transportation. Too little too late, even if it stayed on track, delivering a small increment to the U.S. power grid better part of a decade from now, which would be overwhelmed by the renewable power added that same year. Deployment on a scale that would be meaningful was simply not in the cards at the high cost of the technology. It is helpful to realize that to add 1% to the current U.S. grid 260 of these modules would be needed, and the NuScale project was for a mere 12.

Still, I am sorry to see it fail and do so this early. It was the most mature project, and had the sense not to propose the use of "high assay low enriched uranium" (HALEU) which has enrichment above 5% and can have enrichment up 19.75%. Currently nuclear power plants have LEU with enrichment up to 5% which is what NuScale was planning. Using HALEU has two problems. The first is that no one makes it on the needed scale, so new production would have to be set up and it woudl be niche product no being able to leverage enriched uranium economics (raising costs further). The second is that as enrichment climbs above 10% it becomes possible to make kiloton scale bombs with it. The amount needed is several hundred kilograms, but the industry would consume several hundred to several thousand tons a year so additional protection against diversion would be needed. With NuScale this issue never arises.

Small modular power reactors would be a useful industrial product to have available - mostly for niche deployment situations, not a cost-effective contributors to the national grid.