Sebastopol is home for OReilly Books and Make Magazine. Folks I spent a decade in school with are running Make blog and magazine. From my own graduating class, even. Kinda shocking, really. My home town is 55 miles from San Francisco, has that same fog, despite being inland about 15 miles, and is half cattle ranches and half vineyards, with the same oppressive totalitarian Democrats running things to the maximum state of corruption and Nerf-herding hypocrisy as you find in San Francisco. I eagerly await a plague to off them all. Then I'd move back. With a good water filter to strip out the Mercury, of course.
The roads there twist and turn around the monster oak trees, each individually stronger than the meanest muscle car frame or flatbed truck. Make a mistake there, you need prying out or just get buried with it. In my home town, your needed all independent suspension, not a big motor, if you wanted to survive your first year driving in the same car. BMW's were popular there for good reason. It wasn't just because idiots in Marin sold them after a few years to upgrade to the new model so they were locally plentiful. They also handle well on very bumpy roads. The roads up here are slightly less bumpy, but nearly as potholed.
I think, if there were more crafty persons teaching their kids instead of gutless retirees doing nothing but drink and brag about their stock portfolios, we'd have more Makers around here, but we don't. Things like Making requires both tools and visionaries, and we don't have either of those. This is why the locals complain they can't find machinists and its one of the few good paying jobs in this area. Ironic, I think. They don't teach it down in the Valley either, from what I can tell, and don't pay well down there either. Its like California is actively trying to drive away all hope of a future, and become nothing but headstones and burned ruins. WTF is up with that? Sebastopol, for all its faults, is doing something, perhaps against the grain, but something at least. Zap bikes is there, the electric bicycle company. For a while Zap was talking about a car, but then Tesla did it better and bigger and that's died down again.
Early on, after learning about Peak Oil, the group I belonged to did research into electric cars. The available pool of Lithium, worldwide, was enough for 2 million cars, and this included the dregs from Russia, the Lithium in Nevada, the salts in Bolivia, and trace amounts elsewhere. That pool has since doubled due to a find of Lithium brine in Wyoming, but that still only amounts to enough lithium for 4 million cars like the Tesla, which is the big reason I know their whole enterprise is a praying for a new battery type that hasn't even been discovered yet, much less ready for market. I think that answer is Thermite, with a catalyst to both slow it down and to reverse the reaction so its chargeable with electrons, not a one-way oxidation reaction.
Thermite is made of aluminum metal powder and rust, iron oxide. The iron transfers the oxygen to the aluminum, aggressively, which generates impressive amounts of heat and is VERY VIGOROUS, allowing anything the thermite is physically touching to melt. You can destroy a battle tank with thermite. Its usually listed with explosives, but its very easy to make and used to be used for field welding or other purposes before all this Terrorist nonsense started. Industrial processes are fascinating, after all. Thermite is an aggressive process of oxidation, and there are already types of one-way fuel cells that use aluminum metal and air, with big vents, for one-time emergency radios such as used for military weapons, like nukes. They're very light, very strong, and utterly reliable: once. After the metal is gone, they stop working. I've heard one working. They make a crinkling high pitched sound and the units get HOT and sometimes smoky, but they still work. There's no known way to reverse this process, since the cells oxidize and once powdered, it loses conductivity. Ergo, retaining conductivity is probably the crucial step. I suspect salt brine will be a key aspect. The eventual battery will be one of those bizarro "why didn't anyone think of that" things, like how the Mexicans never noticed the gold in California despite running cattle through those very rivers and streams. All they needed to do was Look Down.
A battery based on oxidation of aluminum has a nice energy density. Aluminum is so common its everywhere, not a rare earth, no need to fight over it. Everybody on earth could have an electric car with lots of range if this existed, cheap, because common ingredients mean cheap batteries. And aluminum is light weight, like lithium, and far less likely to catch fire and poison you or explode when the air gets damp. Lithium does that. So instead of only having 4 million cars for the whole world, a sign of the very rich and well defended Tyrant class, we'll all have electric cars, billions of them, all charged by solar panels. Meaning we don't have to poison the world or kill each other for industrial metals mining. That's a good step in the right direction. For everybody. See why chemistry is good?
So what does it take to enable a controllable reaction, keeping the heat minimal and putting it all into electrical current? It needs a catalyst, or a brine, probably a solution so the powder doesn't happen and the metals remain mobile not a one way reaction. Maybe Potassium Perchlorate? That's got a nice bundle of oxygen attached to it, and its a salt so it would brine nicely, and should allow aluminum crystal growth. The chlorine would be a strong channel for the electrons. You could get it from sea water. The potassium is common both there and in granite, like decomposed granite, granite dust, stream deposits in every river valley. Literally common as dirt. Like Aluminum. Another option would be Sodium Ferrite, maybe hydroxyl for pH bonuses. Don't think that's as common or as active, but it would probably still work.
Wish I had a chem lab to experiment. With I knew chemistry better so I could experiment with a simulator. Then run tests so I could find how well it charges and how many recharges before it fails. Once again, wish I'd changed majors. This time to Chemistry instead of my actual degree. I was encouraged, but there were no hot girls in Chem department. We had Ansley and quite a few other bits of eye-candy strutting around. Considering one of my classmates from High School majored in Chemistry, was our Valedictorian in college, and still ended up the Assistant Manager of a movie theater after graduation, I'm not sure it would have helped. We live in an Ffed up world.
Chemistry is the right answer, and we should stop listening to Rock Stars as our source of wisdom. Even Battery Rock Stars like the inventor of the Lithium battery. He's an old man, will die soon, and has blocked research into alternatives because only HE is the expert and everyone else is wrong. Same with Hawking insisting his biased model of Quantum Mechanics, without many experiments and poor explanation of linkage, insists only HE can define the universe. Bullshit. To both of them. Science will go on, after they die. I really hope we learn from this. Tyrants are tyrants. Both are tyrants. Both get slaves and keep them dumb and obedient. Don't invest in companies that require slaves to function. They fail when the tyrant dies.
Until we have a Thermite battery, we're stuck with internal combustion or pedal power. At least motorcycles are fun.
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