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A comment on Ask HN: Is recycling lithium virtue signaling or greener/cheaper than mining?.

Re:Ask HN: Is recycling lithium virtue signaling or greener/... by beauHD on Thursday September 22, 2022 @05:42PM (#32944995)
Lithium is not viable long-term. In the short term it is, and the great fallacy of our time is that it is renewable. There are even memes on TikTok of people charging their Teslas with a petrol generator if you care to look.

The only real way to solve this is mining space asteroids which contain much more (rare) precious metals than our earth can provide.

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Re:Ask HN: Is recycling lithium virtue signaling or greener/... by tuatoru on Thursday September 22, 2022 @06:10PM (#32945282)
The bottleneck in supply that is causing high prices is not lack of lithium ore, but lack of refining capacity, that purifies lithium ore to lithium carbonate or lithium oxide at the purity required for making batteries.

There is plenty of lithium out there. There are at present not enough refineries to clean it up, but that is easily fixed. The cure for high prices is high prices.

Lithium is definitely renewable. It's more difficult than lead in lead-acid batteries (approx 99.5% recycled), but it's doable, and will eventually cost the same as lithium ore from mines. Recycling will start when there are a few million tons of dead lithium batteries to start recycling.

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Re:Ask HN: Is recycling lithium virtue signaling or greener/... by toast0 on Thursday September 22, 2022 @07:36PM (#32946038)
> There are even memes on TikTok of people charging their Teslas with a petrol generator if you care to look.

Well, I don't have petrol or a Tesla, but I use my plug in hybrid as the load when I run my portable gasoline powered generator once a month. Better for the generator engine break-in than running it idle, and better than running a dummy load that just warms the environment, and better than trying to get the well pump to run a lot to exercise the generator and waste the aquifer.

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Re:Ask HN: Is recycling lithium virtue signaling or greener/... by metadat on Thursday September 22, 2022 @06:35PM (#32945507)
> People tried it and Elon musky found out about it and updated all Tesla's software to make sure it could never be done again. The idea of a Tesla driving down the highway towing a generator infuriated him.

https://www.quora.com/Can-you-drive-and-charge-a-Tesla-at-th...

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