Posted on 05/18/2022 7:29:32 AM PDT by Red Badger
RE: Batteries for Electric Cars Now Demand More Cobalt Than Phones
Hmmm... I wonder which publicly listed company in the USA is the foremost supplier of cobalt...
SURPRISE SURPRISE
Not a problem as they get their Cobalt from child labor in The Congo. Just don’t tell anyone with an electric car.
Only a fool would charge his EV in a garage attached to his house while his family slept.
Thanks for posting this.
“Only a fool would charge his EV in a garage attached to his house while his family slept.”
Would you keep a car filled with very flammable gasoline in that same garage?
Not while charging an EV next to it. Otherwise yes.
Good to get a sense of your intelligence level.
In this case it is determined to be pretty low. Spontaneous fires in gas powered cars occur at much higher rates than in electric.
Just sayin'...
Hopefully you are not one of those delusional people susceptible to crude propaganda who actually owns an EV, charges it in an attached garage and posts on FR.
“Would you keep a car filled with very flammable gasoline in that same garage?”
Gasoline is flammable only when combined with oxygen. In a container it won’t burn, whereas lithium batteries have materials within them that can all by themselves catch on fire by uncontrollably self-distarging.
Such a shame we didn’t mine the crap out of Afghanistan while were were wasting money there...
I'll be Paul Pelosi knows the answer to that, courtesy of his wife.
Is the acquisition of cobalt environmentally sensitive?
Contrast with battery charging, where there is current flowing (usually quite a lot of it). Add to that the unfortunate characteristic of lithium cells to outgas and overheat when even mildly overcharged, which easily happens when the cells are connected in series. One bad cell in a series string will depress the total voltage, fooling the charge regulator electronics into continuing the charge even though all the other cells are full.
You can get around this to some extent by monitoring the voltage of all the cells in the string individually, but with a car battery pack containing many hundreds of cells this gets to be an incredibly complex design problem. Infant mortality in just one component out of the thousands in the charge control circuits gets you a potential fire.
THEN you have also to take into account that lithium cells normally get warm while charging, so you have to monitor individual cell temperatures as well, to guard against a dangerous overheat, Another several hundred sensors and circuits, any one of which can suffer component failure.
VERY. A lot of it is extracted as a byproduct from open pit copper mining, but there are also a lot of illegal "mines" in the "Democratic" Republic of Congo that employ children.
We need to disrupt the battery industry domestically, with laws that forbid the manufacture or import of batteries using cobalt that is not sourced from friendly countries. Besides supporting “made in America” we have to quit supporting shit holes and dictatorships and start sharing with friends only when we can and when we need to.
here’s who has the most cobalt
https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/features/largest-cobalt-reserves-country/
And yet somehow out of a fleet of approximately 1.5 billion petroleum fueled vehicles, the number of house fires started by them while their owners slept is basically nonexistent. In contrast manufacturers have had to warn owners not to charge their electric vehicles in their garage while they were sleeping. So yes, tonight once again I will take a chance and park my gasoline powered car in the garage, but no I would not charge a Chevy Volt in the same garage while we were sleeping.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the danger that gasoline presents when stored in a vehicles fuel tank.
You do realize that gasoline stored in a vehicle's fuel tank cannot be ignited unless the vapors in the empty portion of the tank are mixed with enough oxygen to get them within the flammable range? The flammable range for gasoline is between 1.4 and 7.6%. Under 1.4% the mixture is too lean to burn and over 7.6% the mixture is too rich to burn. In open air it is quite easy to get gasoline to burn, in an enclosed tank not so much. And what ignition source is found within the tank of a vehicle parked over night in a garage?
I have been to many fires where vehicles were totaled when the structure, they were in caught on fire but the contents of the vehicle's fuel tank never caught on fire. My crews and I also put out many vehicle fires where the vehicle was totally involved, but the contents of the fuel tank never caught on fire.
Electric vehicles have a completely different set of safety issues. Charging giant vehicle battery packs inside creates known and sometimes serious safety issues.
It is one thing when a cell phone battery shorts out and catches on fire or explodes while being charged. We are talking about a battery that typically weighs an ounce or two. When we are talking about a Tesla battery using the same basic chemistry but weighing more than a thousand pounds and holding tens of thousands of times more electrical energy... it is a completely different problem. You pretending to be blissfully and willfully ignorant about the risks involved with massive lithium-ion battery packs is very disingenuous.
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