Reply to post: Re: Now ask me why ...

Connected car in the second-hand lot? Don't buy it if you're not hack-savvy

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: Now ask me why ...

it turns out that it it was more environmentally unfriendly to buy the electric/hybrid car vs keeping your old one (Especially the electric, due to the apparently really environmentally destructive mining of lithium for the batteries).

The entertaining part is that that also has an as yet unused positive byproduct: thorium, which can be used to make far safer nuclear power plants than the current uranium based ones. I am well aware that what you have access to online is probably rather seriously biased, but from my reading so far there is but one argument that keeps thorium out of the picture: it doesn't generate weapons grade plutonium and lots of waste as a byproduct so there are no truckloads of money earned (as a matter of fact, thorium reactors can help reduce the waste pile).

This flags up a very interesting question: is this maybe why China switched to exporting only the finished product instead of the raw ore?

My feeling is that (based on what I have read so far) if thorium reactors were to become mainstream due to their inherently more safe failure mode and their far lower complexity, the balance would definitely shift to electric cars - basically to switch anything possible to electric.

That is, if some assholes don't nick the cables first for the copper.

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